I apologize for not being able to update the blog as often as I would like, but I am very busy and I can not allocate the required time to post decent information.

The Spanish Government has decided to include broadband as an universal service, starting in 2011. This is definitely good news. However, to offer just 1Mbps is not enough in order to offer future services, so again, this will a unuseful action that will angry everybody.

Network operators are not happy because universal service means to subsidize money because the service is not profitable.

At the same time, end users will have basic broadband, but they will not be able to do much, as 320k down / 1M up offers a very basic network experience, to e-mail, surf and Skype in low quality.

I replied to the open query of the Ministry of Industry, saying that the universal service required SYMMETRY and at least 6Mbps, but I figure out they do not understand why we need this…

Again… the Government is loosing tempo in the development of next generation networks… and making everybody angry.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Telecom Italia, the italian incumbent, is prepared to cooperate with other operators to share costs in the development of NGNs in Italy, once the Italian government has presented a broadband plan to offer 2Mbps across Italy.

This is good news.

However, they are totally against structural separation.

The idea that Agcom (italian regulator) is promoting, is to create a company to build up new NGN infrastructures, funded by networks operators and the public sector.

Vodafone Italia, Fastweb and Wind have already said yes to the proposal but I think that they will have to negotiate in order to find an agreeable model.

Most of the regulators are realizing now that the liberalization of the telecom market done in the decade of the 80s and 90s was not done in the best possible way. This has affected the investment and now, we are in a dramatic situation in many European countries. At least, in those where the incumbent is very predominant.

Thus, the creation of this public or private infrastructure providers are good news in order to encourage competition and the development of NGNs. The business model for them is very controversial, as there are many different approaches.

If you follow the comments about the post of last Friday, you can see that the issue is not black or white.

Today’s post is about the necessity to offer an open access layer 0 and layer 1 infrastructure… does it has sense to offer dark fiber so all the operators deploy their own networks?

In Switzerland they are following this approach, but… is this level of unbundling necessary?

My personal opinion is that it is not necessary from the cost point of view, although I will not enter into regulatory issues.

Swiss multi fiber approach is a good solution in a market where all the operators want to keep with their existing business models, but… are those business models future-proof? Is this the best business model for the end user?

We all know that incumbents are not happy sharing infrastructure, but now, all operators are private companies so they have their boards that dictate the deployment strategies based on business profitability. This means that what used to work in the past, it is unlikely to work now, as the copper networks that where deployed in the 20th century were built by public telecom companies that later on where privatized, most of them keeping the copper that was paid by all the taxpayers.

Now, the picture is quite different. In most of the countries we have the incumbent operator, which was the former telecom public company, and new operators that deploy their own CATV network or resell incumbent’s services. Others deploy fiber, but this is just a minority.

The cost of deploying a new access infrastructure is huge, so just very big operators can afford to deploy NGNs. Thus, regulatory bodies believe that it is good to deploy dark-fiber-based operators so other operators can hire their infrastructure and deploy their active equipment. This is the approach that will be followed in New Zealand, for instance.

Although this is a intermediate approach, I do not believe it is the best approach, because it is not optimal from the cost perspective point of view.

Following this operation model, each operator will have to deploy their own active equipment in every single home, take care of the maintenance… and this increase the cost, thus, the price of the service.

So… what would be my recommendation?

Keep things simple and deploy one single network, operated by a public or regulated company, offering ubiquitous and identical services to all of the network (layer 2 and above) operators. Following this model, we will reduce

• deployment costs,
• operational costs and
• will be able to offer universal services.

So, in a single strategic decision, we would be able to sort out all the limitations that are stopping next generation networks to be developed. Also, this would be the cheapest way to deploy NGNs, which means that potentially, service costs would also be reduced.

We can summarize this concept in a single sentence: telecom infrastructures should be considered a utility.

We would not understand to deploy parallel power networks, right? Why then we want telecom operators to compete at the infrastructure layer? I think this has no sense…

While the Spanish Ministry of Industry asks about the definition of broadband as an universal service, Finland has already regulated broadband access and as of July 2010 every single citizen in Finland will have the right to get 1Mbps.

In 2015, minimum bandwidth to every single citizen will be of 100Mbps.

Meanwhile, here in Spain, there are many rural areas which do not have broadband access and in those which broadband is available, just the incumbent, Telefonica, offers connectivity, normally limited to 1Mbps and quite expensive. Competition is just limited to the dense populated areas.

Also, plans to offer higher datarates have been stopped due to the economic crisis (see my post of yesterday), so here the situation is very disappointing.

We now ask, while others take decisions.

Last week, Telefonica presented their main policies for 2010 and next years. Very disappointing… at least for their customers.

They will increase the dividends to their investors but they will not invest that much on new infrastructures. They predict that in 2012 just 23% of end users will have services higher than 25Mbps. This is not good news…

Talking about the deployment of new infrastructures, they will deploy just FTTH in the areas where customers are prepared to pay for premium services. This means that just in wealthy areas FTTH will be present. They have not confirmed the prices but I assume that they will not be cheap.

For the rest of the users… ADSL or VDSL will remain as their connection technology.

I see more clouds than clear skies in the development of broadband in Spain because if the incumbent is taking this road, I can not see other operators investing in FTTH. Public funds are the only way to avoid a real digital divide with the rest of European countries, at least for the majority of the population.

After the long weekend it is time to come back and write a nice post about our high-quality broadband.

The chart above, which presents a comparison between average upstream datarates for 3G and ADSL, speaks for itself.

I can not understand how a serious company can offer more upstream datarates on 3G than using ADSL but this is what is happening in Spain at present.

Obviously, this limits what you can do with your broadband connection, and our role in the Internet becomes merely passive.

Furthermore, things are not going to change in the short time. During last week Telefonica corporate meeting, they announced that during the next years they are going to prioritize price to performance and datarates will just increase around 25% until 2012, deploying FTTH just in wealthy areas were customers are prepared to pay a premium to get decent speed.

Bad news… to start this short week.

Zon has announced the availability of a 1Gbps service for home users. The service will only be available through FTTH, of course, and will include everything: voice, video, data, mobile…

I think it is a huge step forward in Europe. Portugal is now becoming a reference about FTTH deployments.

The only negative point of this new service is the price: EUR 249.90 per month plus a installation fee.

I can not see many homes paying that for their broadband services and at the same time, the offer is not targeted to businesses, as it also includes video and other stuff that businesses do not need.

I see this announcement somehow a way to show the potential of FTTH but I predict take-up rates will be very low. To compare with the car industry, this is like the manufacturer releasing a very exclusive model, just to show their technological potential.

Cable guys can not follow the FTTH road…

The National Institute of Statistics (INE) published last week (2nd November) the statistics about the use of broadband and computers in Spain. You can read the press release of the study here.

Let’s analise a little bit the results.

If we are positive, the conclusions are that 51,3% of the homes have broadband, over a total of 54% that have Internet access. I deduce that the other 2,7% connects to the Internet using 56k modems. This is somehow good news, although we all know that the Spanish definition of broadband is not what people in other countries would expect of a broadband connection… Here we say broadband when the connection is +256kbps down…

Anyway, the fact is that half of the homes are connected to the Internet. The second relevant fact is that the use of computers at home is of 66%. What does it mean? That if we correlate the fact of have a connection to the Internet with the use of computers, the result is that 77% of the homes that have computers also connect to the Internet.

Then, I come to the rationale behind the title of the post.

If we want to improve the use of the Internet and the use of broadband connections, we have much more room for improvement if we work first on explaining to the people who do not have computers at home that they need one, because when this happens, the justification for a broadband connection is automatic.

I also mean, we need to introduce the use of computers to old people so they know how to use them. We need to use also computers to try to integrate people with difficulties to society… Simultaneously, this means new business opportunities to the industry, because the interfaces for those people will be different to the ones that use skilled people…

Thus, the conclusion is clear, before we explain that broadband is required, we need to convince people that they should buy computers, as in the short term, I can not see the TV becoming the device to access the Network.

An article published last week in the economic newspaper cinco dias presents the situation of IT developments in the corporate sector.

One of the figures that are relevant is that in 16% of the companies that have been interviewed said that they have teleworkers, defining teleworkers as people who work more than 50% of their time from home instead of from the office.

Most of those teleworkers do not have a very good network experience, as ADSL is the most common connection. Thus, their telework experience is restricted to checking e-mails, connecting to the corporate VPN to check files and Skype…

Yesterday I said that upstream datarates need to be improves because here in Spain, the average is around 400kbps.

Thus, we have another driver for NGNs deployment: if we have fiber and we can have more upstream, teleworking will increase and this will have many advantages:

• family-work conciliation
• business cost reductions
• more productivity
• less mobility
• positive impact in the environmental

Again, another justification to deploy NGNs and change the economic model of our country…

I have said several times that upstream is key to offer a satisfactory broadband experience and I have found a report that supports my statement.

The report is from September 2009, developed by Saïd Business School and the University of Oviedo and supported by Cisco. You can see the slides here.

The report says that globally, broadband has improved quite significantly during the last year. Downstream has increased 49% to reach 4.75Mbps. Upstream has increased to 1.3Mbps, which represents an improvement of 69%.

In Spain, however, upstream datarates have not increased in the same way. Spanish downstream average is 4.25kpbs but upstream is just of 386kbps.

The report recommendations are to have 1Mbps up and 3.75Mbps down now and 5Mbps down and 11.25Mbps down in the short term to enjoy a good network experience.

As you can deduce by yourself, present upstream datarates are not satisfactory to enjoy the Internet decently and there are not many commercial offers offering more than 1Mbps upstream.

For the short term requirements, Adamo is the only one that offers a product that can cope with them.

Taking about our position in the rankings, Spain is #33, just after Romania (#31) and New Zealand (#32) and before Bulgaria (#34).

We have to wait…

Openreach (UK wholesale operator) announced last week that they will start FTTP trials during the first trimester of 2010.

You can find Openreach’s press release here with more details.

• The tests plan to offer 40Mbps initially, which may go up to 60Mbps.
• Upstream will be limited to 10Mbps up.

Frankly, for a FTTP trial, I find this trial very modest and there are other already operational project that offer much more bandwidth… Anyway, it is a first step so it is not bad news at all.

Anyway, I think that the UK is quite close to Spain in terms of FTTH developments. They are slightly better, but not as good as in other big countries like France, and much worse than the Northern countries.

In the UK there is real CATV competition so there are alternatives, but overall datarates are not that high…

Can any UK-based reader complement this information?

I really believe that one of the drivers for the development of open access networks based on fiber technologies will be to offer remote medical services. Telephony Online published sometime ago an article about the present crisis and the development of open access infrastructures and in this post I will try to give the Spanish perspective.

Now that we all know that network operators will not develop FTTH massively, we need to find a good “excuse” to deploy NGNs and this justification is the social benefits of having broadband connections.

The first reaction after you enjoy true broadband (not the crappy xDSL that we have now) is a reduction of mobility. Why? You can work from home (ok, just a few days…), you can interact with other remotely in an efficient way, you can become a content provider (not just a consumer) but for me, one of the most relevant social benefits of FTTH is the ability to offer medical services remotely.

There are several medical services to be offered using broadband but in this post I will focus on services for the end-user. I will not talk about interconnection of hospitals to analyse high-definition material, but about how broadband affects the end user.

Here I list a few points:

• The patient can avoid visits to the doctor by first having a remote dianose
• Old people can interact with the doctor from home
• Quality of life of people with reduced mobility is improved
• Remote monitoring allows patients to be at home while under supervision

This is just a small list, because the possibilities are huge. In that sense, I recommend to have a look at i2Cat foundation site and check for the projects that the e-health cluster is developing. You will be surprised.

Anyway, the best of all this is that, the service to the patient is improves and simultaneously, costs are reduced. The number of beds in the hospitals can be reduced, primary services can also be smaller, mobility is reduced…

In our public health system, this is very important and saves a lot of money!

Then, we have another justification to deploy broadband in general and FTTH in particular. To offer advanced medical services and at the same time reduce the costs of our public health system.

Fiber is the future. We all know this.

ARCEP, French regulator, presented the study about the evolution of broadband in our neighbor country in the last six months. If you know french, you can read the article here and in any case, you can check the figures.

Source: bandaancha.eu

The report shows a very good evolution of the broadband market in the first six months of 2009, with a positive evolution of +35% in the number of users with datarates over 50Mbps (now there are 230.ooo users).

The number of FTTH connections has doubled.

Another very interesting point is the definition of next generation network. ARCEP defines NGNs as connections over 50Mbps down and 5Mbps up. If we follow this definition in Spain, we have just NGNs in Asturias and in two buildings in Barcelona through Adamo, as the rest of the operators offer less than bandwidth than the frech definition.

Here, in the meantime, we have 5000 FTTH users of Telefonica and a few ONO users in Madrid with DOCSIS 3. We have also the FTTH deployment in Asturias and some trials at 22@ in Barcelona, but those are just oasis in a very depressing landscape.

Yesterday, the 8th Telecommuncation annual meeting organized by the technical telecommunications engineers association took place. It was a very interesting event and this year one of the hot topics was the development of new services and infrastructures, and more specifically what they call digital cities.

First of all, I do not like the name digital city because one thing is to digitalize content (from the analog domain to the digital domain) and another one very different to communicate and exchange information remotelly. Actually, we could all exchange DVDs and hard drives and we would be in a digital city… Thus, instead of digital cities, I will use the word connected cities.

One of the points that were raised yesterday was the fact that with the present infrastructure available (less than 1Mbps, and highly asymmetric) we can not expect to become a connected country in the short term, and before talking about services, we need to talk about infrastructures.

The problem here is that the investment is huge and after the investment of the government in 2009 to mitigate the impact of the crisis (I will not enter into whether the money was spent in the correct way) for 2010 the investment from the public sector, although present, will not be enough to change the economic model. Telecom operators are not going to invest heavily either so the only development that I see happening in 2010 will be utilities and municipalities developing local NGNs.

This is not superb good news, but it is better than nothing. Thus, maybe 2010 is not the year of fiber in Spain (following yesterday’s post) but at least, I expect some projects to start happening.

And this is the main point of today’s post: if those municipal and utility-driven projects go ahead and they develop their own access infrastructure (based on fiber, of course), how will they connect to the core network to really become a connected city and not just a digital village?

At present, there is an important project lead by the catalan government to deploy fiber across Catalonia, but, will this fiber be ready when the municipality has its access network deployed? Who else can offer fiber connectivity to the village at a decent and competitive price?

Telefonica, the incumbent, is the only one that reach every single town with fiber, but I do not expect them offering it cheap and I can not see connecting an FTTH network to an array of ADSL routers… Wireless through radio-links is also an option but is just a transient solution.

Thus, it is very important that together with NGNs access networks, now that it is clear that intervention from the public sector is required for the development on NGNs, capacity services or dark fiber infrastructure to connect towns and villages are offered by the public sector or by wholesale operators at competitive prices.

This necessity has already been detected in other countries, like in Australia and New Zealand, which are starting country-wide broadband plans.

Anyway, we all know that here we go a little bit slower…