(Musings from Marseille)
The time-lapse shock of grandparents is guaranteed to annoy their youngsters. Much the same effect can be evident when delegates turn up at their annual conference. While they’ve not been paying attention this past year, the world has moved on. And it’s no longer ‘their’ world.
That shock is very much on display here in Marseille at the annual FTTH Council Europe conference. And yes – the youngsters do get annoyed, not least because it takes time and great effort to turn around those giant oil tankers that plough on not noticing (or caring) that that the tide has turned.
But make no mistake; the tide has more than turned. The seas we are navigating have been redefined. The assumptions that have driven businesses along straight lines probably never envisaged buffers at the end of the track.
Here at this fibre-fest the proponents of G.Fast to interconnect with old copper networks inside buildings (not an interconnect from some point halfway to a distant hub) are hearing that the Passive Optical LAN (POL) brigade are intent on eliminating even that last copper thread. For corporates and campuses, the drivers are two-fold – future bandwidth flexibility and vastly reduced energy consumption.
That latter driver is major. Whilst IT departments have been urged to find ways of cutting datacenter energy costs, the internal networks to desktops have been ignored. Optical Networks may reduce energy demands by 80% and that immediate saving has great appeal for the property management sector. It has long been obvious that pushing signals through copper is more difficult than using glass. In the wider networked world, are any network providers offering ‘Green’ access tariff options as are found in energy packages?
Putting a value on future bandwidth flexibility is more challenging but, at marginal cost, few enterprises would choose a cul-de-sac. Come back next year and we’ll probably find that tech-competent extended families will want to create their own software-defined and very private virtual wide area networks – and manage their interconnections with the global web as they wish. And then they’ll not tolerate providers unable to envisage integrated fixed and mobile elements within a shared virtualized infrastructure.
But that’s not all. Even long-standing fibre enthusiasts are finding ‘surprising’ (AKA blindingly obvious) applications that they’d never dared predict. The caution of some investment models has been blown apart by the major service providers – leaving network operators to wonder who will pay for investment in access networks whilst not paying heed to what their customers really need. Do they not realise that once connected (and properly connected) users will use it? No. Provide some half-baked, semi-skimmed, highly asymmetric broadband connection and, surprise, it doesn’t turn them on.
Nowhere demonstrates this as well as Sweden’s 162 local access networks – and wholesale dark fibre opportunities for any enterprise that needs nationwide branch operations. The returns to the investors (often local municipalities) are a godsend to citizens – nobody likes paying taxes. And where did Facebook decide to locate its datacenter? In Lulea, up near the arctic circle, but every bit as well networked as Stockholm and a great deal cheaper. Even their energy bill is reduced in that cold climate. The region also pioneered FTTCP – Fibre to the Car Park – it makes life so much easier for nurses onboard the mobile clinic or library assistants visiting schools. Remote mammography with consultants on demand is way ahead of small UK pilots where (perhaps) a hospital may hook up using Skype for triage work with care-homes and prisons – dramatically reducing the A&E load.
But all that was very evident during our first Study Tour to Sweden in 2013. It takes time for others to hear the messages. If and when they do they’ll probably pronounce themselves ‘”shocked” at the appalling lack of service in, say, rural areas.
The real surprise is that these laggards are, at last, waking up. The truth is out. And the truth is that future optical connectivity is something completely different – with little or no relationship with a past littered with copper wires deployed for some other purpose like analogue telephony.
No wonder the youngsters get annoyed with the ‘so-called’ grandparents. Despite any superficial (or imagined) resemblances, these youngsters were surely born of different stock.
Groupe Intellex 
Congratulations on your “Blindingly Obvious” article which I hope will educate any remaining Public Servants and Politicians in denial.
Might I also mention another vital facet of the desperately needed transition to a true SYMMETRIC fibre network ?
(I believe symmetry is becoming more urgent as the UK begins to realise that e.g. the 5G mobile network requires hyperfast symmetric back haul from almost every property)
However I remain convinced that the “Communications Rail Crash” I mentioned to Parliament in August 2009, when it was decided that the railways should be admonished for killing their passengers due to a lack of maintenance, is even more acute now.
I believe that the only way we can pull ourselves out of this quagmire is with SYMMETRIC (Point-To-Point) fibre. This fibre network allows almost limitless expansion over vast swathes of rural areas as demonstrated by Gigaclear in Devon, Somerset and now Northamptonshire as well as B4RN.org.uk in very sparsely populated rural Lancashire, Cumbria and North Yorkshire. E.g. B4RN grew from 8 Parishes in 2011 now to 53 without a single connection into 27 Public Switched Telephone Network exchanges.
In contrast the incumbent has deployed very small quantities of shared GPON fibre in a ridged (monopolistic) configuration connected to individual exchanges thereby forcing their ongoing existence together with their ever-more-expensive electrical load.
Whilst a commercial enterprise has an obligation to benefit its shareholders it seems entirely wrong to me that this is allowed where taxpayers’ cash is involved which must surely be directed to the most efficient P2P network and also reducing the national electricity load too.
Similarly note that the existing (superior) urban Virgin Media coaxial network delivered in small ducts to almost every front door is by far the easiest way of adding the tiny blown fibre tube thus providing a fully future-proofed symmetric 1 Gbps service everywhere. The use of the VM ducts must surely accelerate urban deployments, but only where they have a presence.