News about Spanish broadband during last week

10Nov09

I have been quite absent during the last weeks due to a high work load, together with the development of a new blog project, which will be released very soon.

Anyway, several things have happened during the last couple of weeks in Spain, which I will summarize in this post.

The most amazing news that were published last week refered to the perception of our politians about broadband services in Spain.

Our Ministry of Industry, said that the price of broadband is quite competitive and also that we enjoy good connection services… This is very frustrating and demagogic, because they are trying to convince that we are in a good position, while the situation is completely opposite.

Following this road, about broadband performance is Spain here I give you a very interesting comparison: Telefonica offers better wireless services in Germany, through O2, than wired services in Spain… This is very sad and goes completely against the comment of our ministry…

Continuing with the comparation between countries, in the next link you can find the offer of the German operator that has been just acquired by Telefonica. As you can see, they are offering 50M/10M on VDSL for 45EUR… I will not comment more on that..

I will try to write a new post before the end of the week. Anyway, stay tuned for news about this new project that I am developing. I hope you will find it interesting

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about jobs in ICT

03Nov09

First of all, I apologize for the lack of contributions during last week, but I was very busy so I had to prioritize… Sorry for that.

Today I want to write about a report published by the OECD about the impact of the crisis on ICT. You can find the report here.

For me, the chart above summarizes quite well the situation. Spain is in the very bottom, forth before the last and taking into account that ICT-based jobs have been quite resistant to the current crisis, we have another reason to explain why unemployment tax is so high in our country.

Also, ICT jobs are normally quality jobs and are a good reference about how important innovation is for our country. Thus, we have another justification to try to change our current economic model, based on low-qualitied employment, because if we do not change it, I forecast very dark clouds for the future.

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Teleworking and upstream datarates

27Oct09

FTTH council published a report about the impact of FTTH networks in the industry and homes. You can find the report here.

The report sais that in areas where FTTH is present, teleworking is increased and the number of people who have their business located at home also increases.

Talking about Spain, things are not that positive… The main problem that we have here is related to upstream datarates, that prevent us to be able to enjoy of telepresence and decent connections to our corporate networks through VPN.

Here in Spain, teleworking is just performed by less than 5% of spaniards, while in the rest of Europe, the number of teleworkers increase up to 13%. One of the reasons is upstream datarates, but we can not forget that there is still a social barrier to break, because people tend to think that working from home makes you less productive, which I really believe is not true, but the opposite.

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Open access is good

23Oct09

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society released last week a report titled: Next Generation Connectivity: A review of broadband Internet transitions and policy from around the world.
The document is quite long. You can find it here for download. If you have time, it is worth reading it.

Several analysis have been done to the document. One of the comments that I found mores interesting was the one written by Telecompaper.com:

There is a high correlation between good scores and the level of availability of wholesale access. Countries with an open access regime for services such as bitstream and local loop unbundling have a high broabdand penetration, high available speeds and low end-user tariffs.

The conclusion is that in areas where there are open access networks or a favorable regulatory environment, broadband offers are wider, so services and prices improve.

This is very aligned with my posts of last week about deploying a single open access network, because this would be the most cost-effective way to offer next generation services. One network, and different service providers.

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Speeds and costs

22Oct09

Today’s post will be very short. Actually, just an image, but it is self-explanatory.

If you want it larger, please click here.

I wait for your comments.

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Viladecans announces FTTH project

21Oct09

Viladecans, a municipality near Barcelona, announced that they are planning to deploy a FTTH trial for 1500 homes in 2010.

This is good news here in Catalonia, because it seems that things are starting to move. However, all of us who are in this local industry for some time, know that the Viladecans project started many years ago, with a lot of good intentions but nothing came true.

We hope that now it is the time to start doing things.

As said, the municipally will spend money of the second stimulus plan of the Spanish Government (scheduled for early 2010) to deploy an FTTH network.

There are no details about the operation model or the services that will be offered from ISP point of view. However, the municipality announced that they want to offer social applications, together with e-learning and e-medicine.

I hope that Viladecans will be the first, but not the last in deploying FTTH… as operators do not find the money to invest on NGNs.

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