London needs to speed up digital connectivity

LREF: London is failing to keep up with other global cities such as Singapore and still sits outside the top 20 European cities in terms of digital connectivity, meaning its economy and property industry face being left behind, according to industry experts at a roundtable discussion on digital connectivity at LREF

The city is also being hampered by its legacy infrastructure and a complicated planning system, as well as land availability and a patchwork quilt of ownership, according to Andy Pyle, head for UK real estate at KPMG.

Paul Carson, head of technical and process innovation at Virgin Media, agrees. He points out that “a truly smart city would have a smart plan for how it deals with its legacy infrastructure,” adding that the fibre connections being used to move data now will support the country’s data needs for the foreseeable future, but with more exponential growth it’s unlikely it will do so in 10 years’ time.

Digital Connectivity – the participants

■ John Gravett, head of telecoms, Cluttons

■ Andy Pyle, head of UK real estate, KPMG

■ Paul Carson, head of technical and process innovation at Virgin Media

■ Belinda Fawcett, general counsel and director of property and estates, CTIL

■ Antony Schober, managing director, KEL Computing

■ William Newton, president and EMEA managing director, Wiredscore

■ Vanessa Lee Butz, chief executive, District Technologies

■ Tripty Arya, founder and chief executive, Travtus

London’s digital connectivity, while dictated by government legislation, is left to the private sector to follow through with and pay for, which to a large degree is not being hitting the appropriate levels.

For Carson the government needs to put some “teeth” behind its legislation and create for those who do not collaborate and cooperate in achieving digital connectivity.

“London is at a unique disadvantage because it’s governed by legislation but there’s no financial muscle to drive that through,” John Gravett, head of telecoms at Cluttons adds.

London also need to be “streetwise” with what the city already has and educating investors, developers and landlords is vital to show them that by “investing in the connectivity of their assets it will actually drive better returns,” he said.

Issues with planning

This is a particular issue for Cornerstone Telecommunications Infrastructure Limited, a joint venture between Vodafone and Telefónica, which manages network sites for both companies and has 25,000 sites for mobile coverage across the UK.

Belinda Fawcett, general counsel and director of property and estates at CTIL, said: “In order to deliver that mobile coverage that everybody wants, 4G/5G, we need sites. What we need is the landlords, the developers, and the real estate market to support and help us to do that and I’m not sure that they are yet in that place … the great ideas, the drones landing on the roofs, those can only work if you can get 4G/5G coverage.”

She added that in the US the state departments will deliver sites for an amount of money within six weeks, whereas in the UK it “takes us years and months to deliver these sites for mobile coverage”.

Fawcett also points out the problems with planning across London’s 33 boroughs pointing out that if a project is split across a borough one may grant it the other may not. The mayor of London’s initiative is good, but it has a long way to go in getting the boroughs to work together, she adds.

However, Antony Schober, managing director at KEL Computing, believes progress is being made in the capital as only a couple of years ago you couldn’t even get any wifi on the underground.

“There is an evolution that we are going through and cities are starting to grapple with what we will need in the future,” he adds.

Changing needs

William Newton, president and EMEA managing director for Wiredscore, agrees and thinks the UK real estate market is starting to embrace the changes needed to up the country’s digital connectivity as it is being forced to do so by occupier requirements.

“The last two years have been remarkable in the response of the sector to the changing needs of tenants.

“If you look at now the increasing use of the cloud, and the need of people to be able to upload in around about the same speed they need to download, it’s shifted tenant behaviour enormously and landlords have responded well to this by thinking about how they can build better buildings and how they can retrofit their existing stock to be fit for the modern world.”

Even so, Newton admits that 95% of any future wireless technology will still need physical wires and a huge amount of base infrastructure to be put in place to bring the fibre wires to more distribution points, particularly as although with 5G people will be able to transmit data at a faster speed it won’t be able to be transmitted as far.

So an over-arching city-wide plan involving regulation and citizen experience of what London as a smart city will look like, as Singapore has, is required according to Tripty Arya, founder and chief executive at Travtus.

“The problem with the first mover advantage is that you’re the first one…you do have to have an additional plan for maintenance for that first mover advantage otherwise you have cities like Singapore which basically pick up the best learnings from everyone else [and move past]”.

Pyle agrees adding that “Undoubtedly if you are starting with greenfield as you saw in Africa, moving immediately to mobile and skipping straight past fixed [card based banking] you have a big advantage in terms of being able to go straight to the best tech that suits you today”.

If you are going to fail, fail fast

The UK digital and property industries need to be more prepared to take risks and fail.

According to District Technologies chief executive Vanessa Lee Butz, the UK property industry needs to embrace the start-up mentality in that “risk and failure is positive, but we need to fail fast. So let’s try things and experiment and then move on to take the learnings to improve our buildings, to improve our cities”.

Landlords and investors should, she said have, test pilots within their portfolios as “if you don’t try things you’ll never learn”.

She added that in everything we are building in our cities we need to remember that they are our homes and technology should be an enabler to make them better to live in and make it easier to connect with people.

Arya added: “The time value of money crept in at some point … and made us extremely risk adverse and that’s basically what happened to the real estate industry. We need to go back to our roots. We as an industry used to take a lot of risk and in fact used to iterate a lot.

“Go for a step-change instead of catching up or being a follower.”