Wirral - the Silicon Peninsula?

Could Wirral see a dark fibre broadband network* offering connection speeds of 100 Mbps by 2011?

Like many things the answer is: it depends. Specifically, it depends on where your business is based.

At the recent meeting of the Invest Wirral Digital & Media Cluster Group, Kevin Adderley of Wirral Borough Council spoke about the council's plans to bring Next Generation Access to Wirral at a projected cost of £12 million.

Kevin quoted possible speeds of 100 megabytes per second (although I am guessing this is actually megabits per second?) and spoke about the benefits for digital and media businesses on the Wirral. There will also be direct links to the various trans-ocean backbone links needed to communicate with the rest of the world.

I joked in my recent 22Tweets inverview about Wirral becoming the "Silicon Peninsula", but maybe this could be closer to the truth than I realised?

The downside is that the dark fibre link will only be extended to business parks.  Riverside Park, where the meeting took place, is being touted as a new digital hub for the borough and the link is expected to be in place here within 18 months. The council expect all business parks in the borough to be connected within a few years.

Unfortunately, extending access to the whole borough would apparently cost more like £40 million, which makes it prohibitively expensive.

What if your business isn't based in a business park? It isn't clear whether businesses will even be able to pay to connect in to the network, but it is likely that it would be extremely expensive to do so.

The trouble is that it isn't just the "digital" business and data centres which will inhabit the business parks which rely on high speed connections.

Professional services business, including solicitors, also need bandwidth to remain competitive over the next five years and a lot of these businesses are not based in business parks, but in traditional commercial districts such as Hamilton Square.

Are these businesses going to be left behind or will there be a migration into the business parks over the next few years, leaving these commercial districts empty?

It is great to see the council thinking creatively, but I wonder if this will benefit business on the Wirral as a whole, or just encourage inward investment by a few large companies?

Are you based on the Wirral... or is your local council also looking at NGA? How do you think it should be done?

*Incidentally, "dark fibre" isn't nearly as exciting as I first thought. It has nothing to do with "dark matter" or evil and just means utilising the unused capacity in existing fibre optic networks... the "dark" fibres. Never mind!