Innovation is key for the development of businesses. We all know and our politicians remind us about this… although they do not support their statements with actions many times. I do not want to enter into politics, but last week, our new government informed that they would cut R&D funding for the next years.

Anyway, let’s go to the topic, which is innovation and broadband services.

Now telecom operators are starting to realize that if they do not innovate and offer novel services, their average revenue per user (ARPU) is stuck.

I would say that connectivity ARPU for residential users is around 30EUR for ultra high speed services and is very difficult to go above this figure. Therefore, if an operator wants to get more money from their customers, they need to innovate and offer new services.

However, I have not detected any offer that is really innovative in our country. The fight is just to offer more bandwidth at a lower price but… do end users really appreciate this? I would say they do not, because once you reach a decent data rate (50Mbps+) the limiting factor is the server side.

So, once we have the transmission capabilities, the next step will be novel applications which accelerate the use of ultra broadband.

I see three sectors where apps can really change the use we do of broadband:

• health
• security
• media

Now, end user main driver is price and not the possibilities they have with their broadband connection. Just power users know the benefits of having fiber at home. For instance, in my condominium, just 4 of 21 neighbors have switched to FTTH. The rest still have ADSL (there are three homes without broadband service at all).

Some advanced media services are starting to appear in the market (netflix and other alternatives) and this generates a new fight between network operators and service providers because the money is in the apps side but as operators have not been innovative enough, internet players have moved faster and are taking advantage of ultra high speed networks to offer really innovative services.

The next will be health, remote learning, security… and will be the topic to be discussed in the next post.

One of the effects that I expect from happening in 2012 is the increase of the digital divide between high-data rate connected places and those with very poor connectivity.

As I explained in my latest post, we are starting to have ultra fast infrastructures in Spain. As an example, now I have at home 50Mbps down and 5Mbps up, which is much more than what I had at the beginning of 2011 with a poor 10Mbps ADSL service that offered barery 800kbps of upstream data rate.

The fact is that in big cities like Madrid and Barcelona we are starting to have a nice broadband offer. However, in smaller cities and towns this is not happening and will not happen during this year.

Therefore, there is a real risk of creating a very deep digital divide between areas where ultra high speed broadband is present and those which just DSL services are available.

This digital divide affects:

• productivity: many companies are not located in the big cities and there are not many industrial parks with a competitive fiber offer. Also, teleworkers and early adopters that do not live in the cities can not effectively work from home.
• territory cohesion: big differences across the territory generate disputes and are not good to overcome the economic crisis
• lack of innovation: connectivity and fiber networks gain momentum if are massively present, so people can really enjoy of high data rates when they communicate to others with similar connectivity services. If just one end enjoys high data rates, innovation and new application can not be deployed effectively…

However, bad news come when man analyzes whether private investment of the big operators can be complemented by the public sector. I can not see this happening, because most of the public governments are finding ways to reduce they expenses and investing on new telecom infrastructures is not a priority for them…

Now we have a new government and their firsts actions they have taken to reduce their budget has been to reduce R+D programs so the next post will be about the contradiction of trying to change our economic model and at the same time do not supporting research and innovation activities…

Now that we are starting 2012 it is a good time to recap what happened in 2011 and also predict what will happen in 2012.

2011 was a year of continuity, with small projects being developed (we have helped to develop FTTH in tree small towns) and Telefonica deploying massively FTTH in the big cities (mainly Madrid and Barcelona). ONO pushed hard their “fiber” and are strongly advertising 50Mbps and 100Mbps services (those rates are downstream, upstream is 5Mbps and 10Mbps, respectively).

Telefonica is also offering 50Mbps (5Mbps up) and in December they started to offer 100Mbps to the customers that have also mobile services with the incumbent.

Smaller and local operators are more creative and Adamo, for instance, is offering 100Mbps symmetric services under their coverage area (Asturias and some areas in Barcelona).

I believe that 2012 will be a year where things will evolve in the same way, so we will have Telefonica continuing their FTTH deployments and ONO offering their high-speed DOCSIS-3.0-based services. Municipalities will marginally invest in fiber, as their economic resources will be very limited and this will increase the digital divide between areas where FTTH is present and those which just have DSL technologies.

Thus, we will have a very digital scenario: up to 6Mbps in rural areas (although Telefonica offers 10Mbps through ADSL this datarate is barely achievable) and big cities where CATV and FTTH is present with +50Mbps broadband services.

The next post will be about this digital divide, how we can correct this and what happens if we do not find a solution to this problem. Keep tuned!

Hi all!!!

This is a quick post, to wish you all Happy New Year 2012 and… to remind you that this blog exists.

I realize that I have not been posting since some months ago because I have been extremely busy. However, one of my objectives of 2012 is to recover the good habit of posting about broadband technologies, so… stay tuned!

We had a very good response in the last events and we expect that this forth one will be as good as the previous ones.

Jornada Optixcat Lleida

This week, as you already know, will take place the annual FTTH Europe Conference. This year the place is Milan.

Unfortunately, I will be unable to come. This will be the first time that I miss it in the last seven years.

The reasons for my absence are the fact that we have several projects that need to be finished this week and also that next week we have a major event in Barcelona: the Mobile World Congress.

Topics of both conferences are somehow uncorrelated, but this year I have chosen to be in Barcelona and develop more deeply MWC.

Thus, if you want to meet me, you already know where I will be.

Yesterday I quickly tweet an article from Bill St. Arnaud about the integration of wireless and wired NGNs. I can not agree more on the statements and facts that the article presents.

• wireless and wired networks are not competition, but complementary. Wireless networks offer ubiquity, freedom of movements and access to difficult places, while wired networks (specially fiber) offer capacity and robustness. Thus, a mix of both is a winner. To compete against each other has no sense.

• integration of wireless and wired networks reduce both CAPEX and OPEX. It is cheaper to deploy and maintain one single network than two. Although the price of specific devices and systems may be higher than the unintegrated network counterpart, overall efficiency is much higher on an integrated solution and this dramatically reduces OPEX, specially in the long run.

• integration is the future. Next 4G and 5G wireless networks will require fiber as a backbone because air spectrum is too valuable to waste it for the uplink of RBS.

In summary, integrated wireless / wired networks are present, not future and if a network operator wants to be successful, they should start thinking into integrating their wired and wireless networks. Efficient use of resources is key, not just to earn more money, but also to be more sustainable.

The last months have been very busy and we have been involved in several projects. We are deploying the OLT in Viladecans for the Municipality so they can offer bitstream services, we are also deploying for a cable operator that is currently migrating from CATV to FTTH and we are finishing our outside plant fibre management software.

Anyway, going straight to the point, now we are also involved in the Telefonica FTTH deployment and we are starting to design the network that Telefonica wants to deploy in Barcelona.

The design of the network is not that difficult, because the viability of the deployment depends on parallelizing the fibre network with the existing copper infrastructure. However, the critical part is the management of rights of way. It is very difficult to get the authorization of the condominium to install the fibre box to offer the service to the building. We are lasting an average of on month to get it and many times, the building assembly rejects the installation.

I think the society has not interiorized the message that fiber IS the future and that without it, it will be very difficult to be competitive. Now that one of the operator decides to invest and start offering high speed data services, now the project is having a lot of difficulties to start because people do not want the fiber cable reaching and passing their buildings.

Several bloggers have lately post about the fact that people do not know what fibre really offers and also there are confusing messages coming from CATV operators, saying that they deploy fiber, so the end customer is confused…

We can not afford to loose this opportunity and, without reaching the deployment methods in Japan, find a compromise between the aesthetic impact and the delivery of new services.

At the end of the day, it is just and extra cable…

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 9,800 times in 2010. That’s about 24 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 42 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 143 posts. There were 19 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 2mb. That’s about 2 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was March 29th with 111 views. The most popular post that day was The race for the Catalonian Open Network starts now .

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were fiberevolution.com, twitter.com, linkedin.com, nae.es, and web.me.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for investment, gpon tutorial, gpon basics, pigeon, and xarxa oberta.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

The race for the Catalonian Open Network starts now March 2010
3 comments

Interesting GPON tutorial September 2009

Open Network in Catalonia (Xarxa Oberta) February 2010
2 comments

How much would FTTH cost to be deployed in Spain? August 2009
4 comments

Viladecans is a reference municipality in the FTTH arena. They have not been the first to deploy FTTH in Catalonia, as there have been other examples like Callús and lately Riba Roja d’Ebre, but Viladecans has always been in the center of the broadband discussion in Catalonia.

They have been not the first in offering service, but they are the first to have real competition on FTTH. There are two players that will start offering services very soon, each of them with their own model, services and attractives.

• Orange will deploy FTTH using their own technical solution, installing their own OLTs and renting fibers from the municipality. They are following a dark fiber rental approach. They will offer symmetric 50Mbps data services, HD TV and phone line for 45EUR/month.
• Adamo will deploy their services on the open access infrastructure that Viladecans is deploying. They are using a bitstream rental model and they will offer 100Mbps/20Mbps asymmetric data services for 29EUR/month. They also have 100Mbps symmetric services for 49EUR/month.

Different approaches, but with the same objective: to get as many customers as possible in Viladecans. Time will determine who chosed the right strategy.

For people outside Catalonia it is quite unviable to come because Tortosa is far away from Barcelona, so this event will be very local, specially because language will be Catalan.

The reason to organize it there is because Xarxa Oberta, the open access operator, will be deployed in this region, so it is important to explain to the people why and how a NGA infrastructure will change their lives.

The panel is very high-level, except for my intervention

You can download the leaflet here.

Finally, Imagina, toghether with Axia, have been awarded the Xarxa Oberta Project. It is official now and unless any legal complain, the project will take place.

Ok, it is just restricted to Terres de l’Ebre and the budget has been reduced to 1/10, but anyway, we hope this will be just the field trial of something bigger.

I have written several posts about the project during these last months and if you have followed them, you already know that the project has suffered many political preasures.

Anyhow, now it seems that Xarxa Oberta will be a reality and we all should be excited because this means that an alternative to Telefonica may come in the mid term.

I have nothing against Telefonica itself, but I do complain about their zero-investment policy in Spain, preferring to go to Chile to deploy FTTH than to do it in their mother country. Anyway, the good news is that with this movement, the public sector has postulated as a driver for the deployment of NGAs, like is happening in Australia and in other countries around the globe.

NGAs are strategic infrastructures and can not be decided by the interest of telecom companies. They need to be defined in the development plans of countries. Xarxa Oberta is just the first phase.

Now that we have Riba Roja deployment operational, it is time to test the service and tweak it for optimal performance. It is quite impressive to have a GbE connection to the Internet but unfortunately the speed that you get in these circumstances is not limited by your pipe but by the server you connect and the hops in between source and destination.

Let me explain.

We tested the service connecting my laptop to a FTTH port with 10M symmetric service and we tried to connect to several destinations using speedtest servers. I expect this is what users will do at first when they get the service, so it is important to check that everything works fine.

The results are as follows: direct connection to Barcelona and Lleida worked perfectly, 10M symmetric without any problem. Well, to be precise around 12M because we are following ONO policy of offering more than the contracted speed. However, unlike ONO, we have fiber all the way to the end user.

In Spain, no problem. 10M symmetric are achievable. Problems start when trying to connect to servers located in the US or Japan. Connecting to US, which will be quite common, showed 3M symmetric and to Japan 3M down / 2M up. This means that when downloading big files, unless there is an intermediate proxy, the limitation will not be in the access, but in the core network.

This is an effect that will increasingly happen as fiber becomes more popular in the access. I remember that while I was preparing my PhD I asked to a fiber guru what would happen with the aggregation networks when everybody would have 100M symmetric because then, the required bandwidth in the core would be enormous. His answer was quite diffuse.

The reality is that we hope (if we deploy FTTH in more places) to move the bottleneck from the access to the core network and this means that big telcos should start thinking about upgrading their core infrastructures.

Maybe this is why they do not want to go FTTH. If they do, they would not only have to invest in access but also in the core.

This Thursday, 23rd September, we have organized a workshop to present i2CAT foundation validation facility and to talk about the Future Internet.

The event will take place at Digitalent foundation building, one of the customers of the infrastructure.

This experimental network is composed of three ROADM-based optical nodes located in three strategical locations:

• Campus Nord: i2CAT NOC with 10G international connections and also connections with Catalan Sectorial Rings
• IMI at 22@: BCN neighborhood where many innovation companies start their operations
• Orange Pedrosa: Orange NOC, near Barcelona IX

The idea of the platform is to create an innovation ecosystem to validate technology, protocols and services that require high capacity networks. Now we have three customers connected to the network and our objective is to connect more than 10 clients during 2011.

You can have more details by downloading the following leaflet (sorry but it is in Catalan).

Workshop on Future Internet and i2CAT validation network

Quite relevant news about the impact of broadband on development, from ITU:

New York, 19 September 2010 – ITU Secretary-General Dr Hamadoun Touré today challenged global leaders to ensure that more than half of all the world’s people have access to broadband networks by 2015, and make access to high-speed networks a basic civil right.

Dr Touré threw down the challenge to politicians, UN agency chiefs and industry heavyweights at the second meeting of the Broadband Commission for Digital Development, which delivered its final outcome report earlier today to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in New York.

“Broadband is the next tipping point, the next truly transformational technology. It can generate jobs, drive growth and productivity, and underpin long-term economic competitiveness. It is also the most powerful tool we have at our disposal in our race to meet the Millennium Development Goals, which are now just five years away,” said Dr Touré.

The Commission outcome report, which includes a High-Level Declaration calling for ‘Broadband Inclusion for All’, comprises a detailed framework for broadband deployment and ten Action Points aimed at mobilizing all stakeholders and convincing government leaders to prioritize the roll-out of broadband networks to their citizens.

…

complete press release

Hope you prefer this to the previous one.

Comments are welcome.

Telefonica is a company that tends to release news to measure the position of the market and then move forward (or not) depending on the feedback that they get. This is specially true when talking about bad news for customers.

Another speciality of Telefonica is to mix concepts.

Let’s go step by step.

First, Telefonica started last week suggestion that those who download more, should pay more because the present billing model was unsustainable, specially with the deployment of NGNs. But… when this will happen? Because later last week Telefonica announced that they may hold investment in NGNs until there are applications that take advantage of them. The egg or the hen?

This debate about flat rates and data traffic is something that has been discussed cyclically and I believe that this will change in the mid to long term (and in the short term in countries like the UK, where Telefonica announced that flat rates have a download limit). The issue is that when flat rates where released in the last decade, the network was dimensioned to cope with them without problems. Thus, they could offer them and this was good from the commercial point of view.

However, I believe that the tendency is to move towards billing models similar to the broadband mobile ones in order to reduce the fact that a very limited number of users consumes most of the network resources. This means that some people pay less and most of the people pay more than they should. To balance this, there are several ways:

• to pay when a specific volume is exceeded
• to reduce the line rate when a specific volume is exceeded
• to pay depending on your average traffic consumption

We are happy to pay other services this way…

This is one point that has nothing to do with network neutrality, but with the commercial strategies of network operators and their marketing policies.

Another debate that is gaining momentum is traffic prioritization and service differentiation. This does affect network neutrality and should be very carefully analyzed in order to find the best compromise.

Now telco operators, specially incumbents, see that the value that they are adding to the value chain is relatively low and that business models that generate a lot of revenue are based on top of OSI network layers: applications. Thus, they want to make content providers pay to use their infrastructures to serve to their final customers and prioritize or limit traffic depending on how much they pay… This is bad news for network neutrality and is something that the entire society should fight against, because the Internet has been until today application independent.

To end up this entry about the difference between the flat rates commercial strategy and network neutrality, here you have a link if you want to comment about network neutrality:

http://commons.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Network_Neutrality:_Classification_of_Arguments_For_and_Against

The Australian NBN plan is in danger now and all of us who were waiting for it to happen to have a reference model are a little bit disappointed. There are many interests involved in deploying telecom infrastructure (politics, operators, …) so it is never easy to propose a change of model and take it forward.

In Spain we have an example of tenacity in the deployment of the open access operator in Asturias (http://www.gitpa.es). It is not very well known abroad, but it is a very good example of a layer-2 open access infrastructure (bitstream services) to offer broadband in many underserved municipalities in Asturias.

In Catalonia we wanted to do a similar approach, but focused on the core network, to be able to offer high capacity services across the territory in order to have an alternative to Telefonica and encourage the deployment of broadband in the region. Telefonica has tried for all means the project not to go forward in all its extension and now seems that they have almost fulfulled their objective: Xarxa Oberta has been restricted to Terres de l’Ebre region and its funding reduced from 680M EUR to 70M EUR.

In Australia seems to happen the same. Many people do not want to have a common platform to deliver services and applications because this dramatically reduce barriers to entry and levels big companies with small ones. Without high barriers to entry (infrastructures), innovation and product differentiation becomes a must and this is something that traditional telecom operators are not very good at.

When you have several choices, then people tend to select the one that better fulfills their requirements. However, when you have no alternative, then innovation is stopped and price tends to be much higher.

This is what happens now in most of the rural areas in Catalonia. You get 1Mbps down and you pay 40EUR/month for this service. People from our government still say that we have a very competitive broadband offer…

Australia has a similar problem, with high prices and limited offer. There, barriers to entry are even larger because Australia is a huge country, which means that to deploy new cabled infrastructure is extremely expensive.

After a few months working on the project, last week we have activated Riba Roja d’Ebre FTTH headend.

We have deployed FTTH to offer triple play services in a small municipality of Terres de l’Ebre region, Riba Roja d’Ebre. The network offers traditional voice services, video services using RF overlay and high speed data services. We are starting now with 10Mbps symmetric and this will increase once we have the critical mass to upgrade our core network connection. This is a problem now, because the cost of connecting to the network is very high! However, we are closely working with several carrier’s carriers to reduce this cost and be able to offer faster connections.

We are migrating the existing CATV infrastructure, which was just used for video broadcasting. The CATV infrastructure was quite old and the price difference between migrating to DOCSIS 2.x (yes, not to DOCSIS 3.x) and to FTTH was of just of 15%. Obviously, the municipality decided to deploy FTTH to have a future-proof solution.

We have chosen GPON technology as we believe this was the one that offered the best trade-off between performance, price, footprint and power efficiency.

The consortium that has developed the project has been formed by four companies:

• Servitet has installed the passive infrastructure and will be in charge of the maintenance of the network.
• Alpha Enginyeria has designed the network and has supervised the deployment.
• TFO has supplied the active and passive equipment. Active equipment is from Enablence and BKTel.
• apfutura has integrated all the services and launched the system into operation.

We are very proud of the job done and hope this will be just the first of many. As traditional operators are not investing in high-speed infrastructures, others have to do it!

Riba Roja d’Ebre is a municipality in Terres de l’Ebre region with a population of 1.348 inhabitants (2009). In Riba Roja d’Ebre there is an important hydroelectric power station and there is no relevant industry, expect the power generation plant. With this project, the municipality expects to attract new industries and businesses and offer new services to Riba Roja inhabitants.

Links

• Alpha Enginyeria http://www.alphaenginyeria.com
• apfutura http://www.apfutura.net
• BKTel: http://www.bktel.com
• Enablence http://www.enablence.com
• Riba Roja d’Ebre http://www.riba-roja.altanet.org/
• TFO http://www.tfosolutions.com
• Servitet http://www.servitet.com

I have just found this interesting report about home broadband in the US.

It is quite interesting, specially when we see what “normal” people think about broadband:

21% of adults do not use the internet: Many do not believe the material they could find online is very relevant to their lives and most do not view the promotion of home broadband access as a high government priority

Overall, 53% of Americans do not think the government should devote much effort to the spread of affordable broadband

This last point is very discouraging, because without government support, operators will not deploy fiber in rural areas… I think we can not leave the deployment of strategic infrastructures just to the private sector, but if the majority of people think this is the way…

Source: Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project