Yankee Group’s mission to chart the future of the Anywhere Network includes figuring out what it actually looks like as it emerges around us. If an informal poll of 250 telecommunications executives at two separate events in London last week is any predictor, the UK’s part of that global fabric must include fiber to the home.

At TEN2008, I shared YG’s forecast for hockey-stick growth in U.S. home bandwidth consumption, explaining that the network effect is not the only thing driving network demand on this side of the Atlantic: video, gaming, and a host of new activities enabled by broadband are causing home appetites for network capacity to explode. Moderator Peter Cochrane polled the attendees on UK household needs, and the group was nearly unanimous in its belief that fiber to the home (FTTH) is the right thing to do right now. (Only a lone banker from JP Morgan Casenove grumbled, “I don’t see how the British family needs more than 3 Mbps.”  Someone sitting next to me said, “Reminds me of Thomas Watson’s famous projection about the world’s need for computers…”)

Then at Yankee Group’s own roundtable later in the week, another group had the same energy on the topic — but further agreed that the British government has a large role to play in ensuring that it actually comes to pass. One participant put it this way: ”Various sources have estimated a UK-wide FTTH initiative as likely to cost between 9 and 15 billion pounds sterling. That’s only 28 miles of highway, a half a bridge, or something else equally modest. Why can’t our government see the incredible value it could create for our economy by pushing this forward?”

Just having survived trips in and out of Heathrow’s new Terminal 5 – stunning for sure, but hard to get to and, as with many airports, a giant chunk out of your day — the sooner we have a high-capacity infrastructure the better. 

[Meanwhile, a group of Swedish communications experts I met with in Stockholm last Wednesday were focused on making the mobile environment deliver on its potential to support Anywhere Consumers. See my summary of their assessment here.]