So what are the benefits of next generation broadband? The economic story part II

So what are the benefits of next generation broadband? The economic story part II

Following the earlier piece, I thought I’d briefly set out what the economic benefits are that are identified in our ‘A Framework’ report, in order to illustrate where we think value would accrue.

The largest categories of private value in the report are: doing things that we do now, but more efficiently; doing more of what we do now; and doing new things.

Each of these categories of value has the potential to be very significant. We make no attempt to quantify the last two, as it would be difficult (if not impossible) to do so.

Doing things more efficiently we have attempted to quantify. Based on 80% coverage, if 50% of broadband users saved 3% of their time, time savings worth £0.9bn per annum would be achieved (based on a value of leisure time used by government studies).

Note this is only an assumption, for indicative purposes. We would be interested in seeing any evidence that could refine this value, such as more detailed research on the activities consumers do online and how long they spend doing them.

The largest categories of wider economic value were: resilience, adaptability and policy options; and spill-over and virtual agglomeration. Again, these were not quantified as this was not appropriate, but we think these are likely to be significant in value.

The substitution possibilities created by next generation broadband would mean that the economy would be far more resilient and able to adapt to shocks, for example an oil price shock by providing alternative to travel. This also creates an additional range of options available to policy makers, which would be highly valuable in itself.

Virtual agglomeration had been identified as likely to be a big benefit from next generation broadband. Agglomeration refers to the productivity benefits of cities and clusters of activity – London, for example, has a higher productivity level than other areas in the UK. Through virtual agglomeration, next generation broadband could achieve some of the benefits of clusters and cities, and without some of the costs of cities such as congestion and pollution.

We also identified other categories of wider economic benefit, such as: an increase in competition in the economy; network effects as consumers and businesses both in the UK and across the world move to next generation broadband; reduced traffic congestion; the value created by the re-use of land and buildings no longer required by a next generation broadband network; reduced business travel; increased online backup; video distribution; and improved connectivity for SMEs. Some of these we did attempt to quantify, such as a reduction in business travel. For our estimations see section 5 of the report.

That’s the whistlestop tour of the categories of benefits we identified. We are keen to see these categories built on over time. We hope that as evidence emerges we will be able to more accurately populate this framework, to build up a more accurate quantitative picture of the benefit of next generation broadband.

Peter Shearman, Policy Manager, BSG