FiberGeneration

France: Towards Ultra Broadband For Everyone!

This morning in Aurillac, in the very hardcore of Rural France, Mr Michel Mercier, the new Minister of Rural Areas and Regional Planning, has simply made the most exciting announcement I've heard this year so far about Fiber Broadband' matters: by the end of September this year, the French Government will unveil its plan for ultra-broadband access to everyone. The plan is held by the Prime Minister, and will involved the collectivities / local authorities as well as the telecoms operators.

More in the days to come...

-------------------------

UPDATE 08/28/09 : Buddy Blogger Benoit Felten, aka "François" on the other side of the Ocean, has posted a link to the pretty interesting note published by Mr. Jean-Michel Soulier, the new head of french-canadian operators' s operator Covage.

In his note, Jean-Michel unveils the call he received from the french government for participation to the future "Ultra-Broadband To Everyone" Public consortium which will deploy FTTH in medium density areas. Pushing the idea of Open Access, Jean-Michel also discloses to us his response :

•  It should be an open access consortium. That is the only way to combine efforts from leading operators without being seen as an anti-competitive vehicle by the European Union lawyers.
• An independent entity should manage it. Once the funds have been committed and the strategic objectives defined by the shareholders, the Board should be able to independently decide where and when to start. This guaranties that no shareholder will try to block the consortium to protect its market share in a specific area. 
• Consortium members who are also retail operators should commit to buy FTTH lines from the consortium. Quotas could be defined according to market shares. This would ensure that the FTTH deployments are effectively used to provide services to the end users and generate cash flows that, in turn, enable leverage with bank loans. 
• A significant share of the Consortium’s resources should be reserved for partnership with local authorities, between 30% and 50%. This would leverage the funds that the local governments are ready to dedicate to FTTH while guarantying them a framework for their investments.

I like the first criteria: Open Access must be guaranteed. That's exactly what I tweeted (in french, sorry) when I heard the announcement by Mr. Mercier: if Telcos are to fund this initiative, how about Open Neutral Access ? That is the main number one top most critical issue on this "Ultra-Broadband To Everyone" matter: we as citizens and consumers can't afford suffering the same situation than with DSL (when you have access to it...): being tied up with a services provider.

Think out of the TriplePlay box. I don't want Orange to sell me Personal Care services, simply because they are not suited for that: to start with, they don't have the right Technical Support structure for such mission-critical services. Anyone asking Orange for an ADSL line or using their Call Center those days will agree with me: it's a pure nightmare, proving that France Telecom is not really looking after the satisfaction of its customers. Therefore, I would never ever give them the ability to deliver me services such as e-Health or Tele-surveillance: questionable reliability, hence a lack of 100% trust & confidence. This is FT-Orange, so you can imagine what's about its rivals, the SFRs and Frees: no better.

FTTH doesn't mean HD/3D-TV. It's means a dumb pipe able to carry any type of data at any rate comprised between 1bps to 1Gbps and even higher. Think Sustainable Development for one: data sent by remote/dispatched sensors, SmartGrid, renewable energies sources 's monitoring, etc. Do you think your Telco is really able to provide you with such services ?...

FTTH Business Model, Or How Illegal Download Leads To New Jobs Creation

The Pau Broadband Country Fiber-To-The-Home network is truly *the* model for Muni FTTH. Here's one example, which I like to share with people in the Governmental sphere those days, in regards of the famous Hadopi law.

Just a few months after the launch of the network back in 2005, the 2.5Gbit/s high-speed links between Pau and Paris' Telehouse hubs became almost overloaded. In the upstream direction. Traffic analysis demonstrated that Gen Y fellows and geeks of all sorts were uploading gigabytes of more or less legal stuff: music, video, software, everything that makes Vuze and the likes so fun to use...

With the remarkable increase of fiber subscribers since begin 2008, an upgrade of these Pau-Paris links was mandatory. 10Gbit/s is now on its way. That makes the distance between the two cities totally transparent, allowing ultra-high speed communications for businesses who run operations in Pau, Paris, and elsewhere in the World, for instance... San Francisco and the Silicon Valley.

Guess what: since empty space is a scarce resource in Paris, new datacenters are popping up outside the capital city. One the very few towns out there able to host Green datacenters: Pau. Pau has all the know-how, skills and legitimacy to offer such high-tech facilities. Here's the beauty of the story: It is because of a band of young guys are playing with the law that Pau can host new businesses in a booming sector. If you are looking for a business model which works, here's one: let the Gen Y play at will.

Call For Editors : The History Of Fiber Optics

Thanks to Dipity, I've created the Fiber Optics History Timeline.
Based on Science & Technology author Jeff Hecht' s "The City Of Light", this is the Web 2.0 version of Jeff' s own chronological page.

The beauty of Dipity is that you can display any type of content in a chronological order (Timeline view), on a carousel (Flipbook view), or on a map (Map view, surprisingly ;-). For teachers and instructors of all kind, what a nice tool to keep your audience up and running.

As any true Web 2.0 app, Dipity is UGC : User Generated Content. In this case, it means that  teachers and instructors can call for help to create a better content - think Wikipedia.

Well, Dear FiberGeneration Readers, I'm therefore calling on you ! I'll continue to edit the current timeline, for instance adding the missing locations, photos, URLs, etc. What I'm asking you is to add relevant content. For instance, as you can see the timeline ends in 1996. As some of you may have notice, quite a few interesting events occured between then and now in the Optical Communications arena. Those are typically the things you can contribute to, shall you have the relevant experience, knowledge, or insight ;-) Major milestones, breakthrough technologies, interesting field trials : please feel free to add !

Just drop me a line at : marc[dot]duchesne[at]mac[dot]com, and i'll set you as editor for this History of Fiber Optics. Thank you.

 

post-scriptum : for those of you who are not familiar with Fiber Optics, Jeff is publishing the "Understanding Fiber Optics" series since almost two decades now. The fifth edition was released in 2005. It's available here at Amazon.com. Enjoy the ride !

"Fete du Tres Haut Debit" Running Notes

Yesterday in Mortain, a beautiful small town a few miles away from the Mont St Michel,was the 3d Ultra-Broadband Conference, held by the french optical cable manufacturer ACOME.

Here are my running notes, as is - means no re-writing * ( my personal comments under brackets ) :

Regis Paumier, CEO, ACOME. keynote speech :

- CETHD Center of Expertise for Ultra Broadband : 1,000+ visitors to date (note : opened mid 2007)

- there are many issues with Quality and Maintenance (on optical networks, FTTx)

- key issue in France (on FTTH) : rural environment.

Ms. Agnes Huet, President, Comptoir des Signaux. market survey by the FTTH Council Europe :

- FTTx networks Business Model :

a) OpenAccess is mandatory

b) Operator vs. End-User : capacity becomes commodity; extends potential services; puts the End-User at the center of the market.

- User-oriented solutions : puts the End-User at the epicenter of the system : dynamic bandwidth allocation, dynamic services allocation.

- Open Access / Open Networks not widely adopted in France : very few existing networks allow such services.

- xPON infrastructures limit Open Access systems.

- Collectivities want to : investigate all potential solutions; model contribution and ROI.

- Collectivities claim they don't have visibility on those solutions (hence the need for permanent live show-rooms).

Yves Le Mouel, President, French Federation of Telecoms (i.e. : Operators) :

- FTTH in France : need 100k new subscribers per month to be considered "mainstream";

- Investments : estimation = 10 Billions euros over 10 years (see recent announcement by SFR - link in french);

- New Business models must be invented, because based on abundance of bandwidth and services;

- the key question is : how to deploy a complex infrastructure to deliver services the simplest way (note : hence the need for a complete paradigm shift. Think Different);

- how FTTH will win by 2012 : the Killer App.

- the Killer App : images, video, online gaming, music, unlimited storage (read : Cloud Computing);

- services : teleworking, telemedicine, teleassistance, telemonitoring, online shopping;

- QoS : PnP, Easy2Go, AlwaysOn.

- avoid the Digital Divide : think Geography, Social, residential customers vs. enterprises...

- issues to be fixed : evangelisation, training & education of networks' deployment professionals (comment : good to hear that from the operators themselves);

- this represents more than 100,000 jobs (comment : good to hear that one too. I personally claim FTTH is a unique opportunity for new jobs and businesses creation, since months);

- target FTTH France 2012 : 3-Mo new subscribers per year. Same as ADSL. (comment : on this one, I slightly disagree : ADSL is easy to deploy, because it uses an existing infrastructure. FTTH : you need to install at least the last mile).

Thierry Houdart, Deployment Director, Axione (ETDE groupe Bouygues). an innovative solution for optical cable deployment :

- install the optical cable along the low-voltage power distribution network;

- speed : up to 1-km per day, by 2 technicians;

- no traffic disruption (road, power, telecom, etc.);

- capillarity : the fiber cable can go right to the end-user;

- infrastructure' cost : divided by a factor of 2 to 3 compared to existing traditional solutions, e.g. buried cables;

- green deployment : lower the CO2 emissions by 50%.

My personal take (this time w/o brackets, because it's a pretty crucial point ;-) : I assume the cost of deployment with this new solution is less than 30€ per meter, all together - site survey, components, installation, etc. Let say we can achieve 15€/m : a fantastic quantum leap for FTTH. 

This solution is a true paradigm shifting one anyway : the split of the cost of deployment is no longer 80% civil work and 20% components + instal; it is now 20% civil work and 80% components + installation. On top, it's an eco-friendly solution. Fiber finally goes Green. Brilliant.

* I wish I could capture notes this way ;-)

Generation Fiber

Read here. I'm glad this blog is named after the Fiber Generation...

Internet Failure Hits Two Continents

CNN Dubai reports :
" High-technology services across large tracts of Asia, the Middle East and North Africa were crippled Thursday following a widespread Internet failure which brought many businesses to a standstill and left others struggling to cope.
Hi-tech Dubai has been hit hard by an Internet outage apparently caused by a cut undersea cable.
Industry experts are blaming damage to two undersea cables but it is not known what caused the damage.
Reports say that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain Pakistan and India, are all experiencing severe problems.
Nations that have been spared the chaos include Israel -- whose traffic uses a different route -- and Lebanon and Iraq. Many Middle East governments have backup satellite systems in case of cable failure."

As stated by one of the interviewed ISPs, this pretty severe outage is a wake up call for the region. But also for the whole Telecoms industry : it's time to stop lay offs and start lay out new cables. Dear submarine systems makers, you've got a bright future ahead of you !

Just like in the mid-90's, when the big projects such as FLAG and SeaMeWe appeared.
The difference ? Today, there are people at the end of the fiber. Applications. Business. Users.
It's showtime for the real Net Economy, folks !

Read full article here.
Thanks Laura for the heads up.

The Magic Is Back, or : Marketing That Serves The End-User

Back in 2000, I titled the brief report of the OFC Optical Fiber Communications exhibition to my management at Agilent Technologies : "The Magic is gone." The whole Telecoms industry was ruled by marketeers, and Fiber was no different. The Lucents, the Cornings, the Pirellis : they were all selling wonderful shiny proprietary solutions to hungry customers (the new telcos which were popping up like hell everywhere on the Planet), totally forgetting that what made the Optical Communications industry in the past was Innovation.
Fact is, until 1998 the fibers were sporting strange names, such as "ITU-T G652". Everything changed in '98, when Corning came out with its Leaf, Lucent with its TrueWave, or Nec with its Lucyna. Since then, marketeers took over the business, leaving inventors and researchers in their labs. The best example : the Pirelli Telecoms booth at OFC'99, with an... italian motorcycle as the only product on stage.
For people like myself, whith a technical background, a marketing position and a customer-focused mindset, the outcome was obvious : a total lack of real customers' s needs, leading to what happened to be a violent downturn.

Today, almost 8 years later, my feeling is that the Magic is back. Reaserchers and innovators can talk to end-users again. See this product presentation video by... Corning : for the very first time since a decade, a new product is a true solution to a real customer problem.

Ma Gray Has You By The Calls *

The old story about Alexander Graham Bell stealing ideas for the telephone from someone else resurfaces, with a new book due to be on the shelves on Jan. 7.
Quote Yahoo! : In "The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret," journalist Seth Shulman argues that Bell — aided by aggressive lawyers and a corrupt patent examiner — got an improper peek at patent documents Elisha Gray had filed, and that Bell was erroneously credited with filing first.

If you are interested in learning more on this long-lasting dispute " Who Really Invented the Telephone? ", the Telephone Tribute report here has the answer(s).
More on Shulman's perspective in the article here.

* original quote found on Wikipedia.

Post-scriptum : this story makes me think about my own idea. What if, in 100 years from now, somebody else than me will be credited for the reinvention of the Test & Measurement industry ? Well, I have the answer (al)ready : no one cares about T&M ;-)

Photo credit : Per Hardestam. Photo available on Stock.xchng here, royalty-free as usual.

2007 : The Digital Divide

Thanks to The Broadband Hub, this highly interesting presentation by Dr. Robert Atkinson of The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF). Although it's 100% USA-focused, I'm sure most of the ratios apply to the rest of the Western World too (incl. France of course and unfortunately).

Among many key figures which help understanding the real situation in regards of Broadband access & use, the one about the perception of the Internet by Disabled persons (page 39) is quite questioning : the Internet, which normally should be considered as one of the most powerful tool to get Disabled people on board, is not. There is a good news behind the bad one : there is plenty of stuff still to be done for real innovation and entrepreneurship in this domain. "Change the World", right ?...

ps: also found in this presentation, the Virginia Tech’s eCorridors Broadband Access Map, that enables real-time, bottomup broadband mapping. Got to find the same for Europe. Or create it if it doesn't exist yet !...

U2 can do fiber (You too can do fiber)

Ever wanted to help building the Future ? Watch this cool video from the online job board GadBall.com, and drop me an email afterwards !

Anyone Willing To Relocate To France, American Fellows ?

Earlier this week, US Telco Verizon  unveiled a Groundbreaking FiOS Internet Service. Claims the press release : " Verizon has changed the definition of "fast" with the introduction of a new, symmetrical Verizon FiOS Internet service for consumers, featuring an upload and download speed of up to 20 megabits per second (Mbps)."

Wow. 20Mbps on fiber, that's quite a breakthrough. For the US. Because, not willing to play the Arrogant Frenchie, but... we've got 20Mbps DSL since years, allowing real TriplePlay services including HD-TV. Okay, DSL is not symmetrical. Guess what : we (well, the lucky guys in Paris or Pau and many other cities across the country) can get full-symmetrical 100Mbps on fiber since months.

Take the city of Pau and its state-of-the-art 'Pau Broadband Country' broadband access network : 40,000+ homes passed, with 6,000+ active subscribers : NeufCegetel offers symmetrical 50Mbps   since May this year, whilst enterprises and high-end users enjoy a full 100Mbps connection.

So, for those of you who seek bandwidth hungrily : take a one-way ticket to the 21st Century' (Broadband) Capital : Pau.


Update 10-27-07 : I just replaced the previous photo for the one above. The reason is that the author of the original photo sent me a message today, claiming the copyright. He wanted me to mention his name, blahblahblah. Well, I would, should this famous photo be about a private thing or so. Fact is, the photo shows a public work on a public street, for a public community (a french city somewhere in the Alpes). In summary, the guy shot a picture of something paid by the French citizens, and he wants a copyright on it. Weird, IMHO. Especially at the Age of the Web 2.0.
To reach this modest person, click here, er, nowhere : I haven't seen any "email me" button on his weblog, which is here.

post-scriptum : the photo is mine, means I shot it myself some years ago, somewhere in Santa Rosa, California.
I must apologize : I didn't ask the authorization to PacBell to take this picture. However, it's here for you, with no copyright. Enjoy it, copy it, save it, distribute it : it's free, because I decided to put it here, on my blog, on the Web, on the Internet.
By the way, the PacBell folks did a great job repairing a fiber optics cable this beautiful morning. I wish the French telcos and I&M contractors be able to deliver the same level of quality. But that's another story.

It's About the Test & Measurement Industry

In a recent post, I mentionned  a handful of  test & measurement players, silencing numerous companies. The reason is pretty simple : IMHO, Agilent Technologies, Danaher's Fluke+Tektronix, Anritsu, and JDSU are the only companies aimed to survive the forthcoming T&M industry shake-up. We are the verge of a new booming era in the Telecommunications, thanks to the enormous demand for bandwidth worldwide. Hence the mandatory consolidation in some sectors, Test & Measurement being one of the most vibrant.
That's why my take is, lots of the small guys will disappear one way or another. Mergers, acquisitions, banckruptcies, the whole range of possible futures is wide open for the EXFOs, the Spirents, the Ixias, and the one small firm somewhere down the Silicon Valley which I can't mention anymore (hint : they have a very very little useless subsidiary nearby the Leman lake, and their name is the opposite of the moon going dawn). Even the Yokogawas will face the big question someday...
In 10 years from now, I see only three survivors out of the Four-Tops above : Agilent, Danaher, and Anritsu. Don't ask me why : just a bit more than a feeling, from a 25-years presence in this industry. It has to do with their history, legacy, and roots, somehow.

Nevertheless, there is one thing I can tell : I'll do my very best to play a pro-active part in this shake-up, thru the Testing 2.0 adventure. See you in 10 years !

Test & Measurement Industry : The Consolidation Still Goes On

According to Lightwave earlier this week, Danaher Corp. and Tektronix Inc. announced they have reached a definitive agreement under which Danaher will make a cash tender offer to acquire all outstanding common shares of Tektronix for $38.00 per share. The aggregate purchase price is approximately $2.8 billion, including debt, transaction costs, and net of cash acquired.

With the acquisition of a venerable company, Tektronix, which is a reference in the T&M Test & Measurement world  together with Agilent Technologies (formerly Hewlett-Packard), the industry landscape is going to change once again. The alliance between Fluke - another pretty strong reference at every Telecoms & Datacoms network installer on the Planet - and Tek is creating a new  one-stop-shopping center covering the whole spectrum of typical applications, from lab & manufacturing (Tek) to installation & maintenance (Fluke), from low-end/high quality/mainstream test gear (Fluke) to high-end/high quality/advanced (Tektronix).

Whilst T&M market leader Agilent Technologies  has to face three major competitors : JDSU, Anritsu, and the new Fluke+Tek actor now, the French-Canadian firm EXFO is left alone as a small player in front of giants. EXFO, whose role model was HP Test & Measurement (aka Agilent) will most probably be set ready for a merger with another group.

   

Note that EXFO's stock slipped quite heavily yesterday, and that Tek's raised rose nicely at the official announcement.
Charts available at Yahoo!Finance here.

post-scriptum : For you who are not familiar with the Telecoms Test & Measurement, I'll publish a brief history of the sector, to show how the T&M folks are still surfing on the ripples of the Internet Bubble' implosion.

Twittervision and Twittermap : two of the greatest Web 2.0 apps for Testing 2.0

I've been playing a bit with Twitter' mashup apps during lunch break : Twittervision and Twittermap. Just amazingly simple tools for displaying any geotagged data on a map.
For those of you who ignore what Twitter is, read this recent post by Guy Kawasaki and follow its links.

post-scriptum : as I'm going to be busier (if running at 120% is possible ;-) over the next couple of months, I'll post more twitters here, thanks to Twitter's SMS feature. Watch the left side bar for updates...

Exaflood ? Exaflood.

Did you know that by 2010, 20 typical households will generate as much traffic as the entire internet moved in 1995 ? This fact, and much more, on this video.

See the video on the original website here
More on Internet Innovation later this week.

Me Too

Ten years after leaving my own firm to do something else, I'm back in the Fiber Optics Training & Consulting business. Since Monday this week, I'm in charge of the creation of a ad-hoc subsidiary at a 20-yrs old / 50-people / fast-growing company here in France.

It's a little bit strange to me : I'm paid to do what I haven't had the chance to achieve with my own firm ten years ago.
The good news is : today, the market is there (thanks to YouTube, Facebook, and MSN), the customers are there, and the tools are there (thanks to the Internet and the Web 2.0).

And thanks to those ten years out of this particular business, I've learned so many different things myself in so many different domains that I'm more capable to run this business successfully than in the 90's.
For instance, this : today, I've been working at Production, assembling and testing fiber patchcords. For the first time since 1983 when I first put my fingers around an optical fiber, I've been shaking. I was afraid of breaking the fiber whilst stripping it. Now I understand my attendees fifteen or ten years ago, when they were shaking and I was saying "come on guy, look at me, am I shaking ?"...

Over the last ten years, I've learned a lot of things, for sure. Maybe the most important one is humility.

 

Building Fiber-To-The-Home Vs. Building Homes

Heard from Mr Dominque Paret, IT Development Director at the Region of Loire (you know, Saint-Etienne, their Soccer Team, their Schlumberger/Wavetek/Acterna/JDSU/Who'sNext? Fiber Optics Test R&D & Manufacturing Plant, etc...)  last week at the Odebit Conference in Paris, this true fact - for France in this case, however I'm sure it also apply to many other countries in Europe : when you build a new road, you know the traffic will double the next year AND you know there will be a new college within the next five years. Simply because people have moved all along that new road.

According to Mr Paret, this is a well known and well mastered model (that's why we have those ENA and X and Mines things ;-). The problem with fiber is that there is no such a model at the moment : nobody can tell for sure what will be the outcomes of a FTTx network  five years after its completion.

Shall YOU have heard or experienced or built such a model yourself (i.e. in/for your community), please don't hesitate to share it !

Chattanooga Choo Choo

Thanks to the weekly delivery of my YouTube' subscriptions, just discovered this video from the Electric Power Board, a.k.a. EPB, of the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee.

A Chattanooga' s public utility, EBP launched a Fiber To The Home initiative back in August this year. In the official announcement, Harold DePriest, EPB’s President and CEO said : ”A Fiber to the Home infrastructure will help ensure a growing supply of jobs for our children – and our grandchildren. Fiber to the Home will be as critical to Chattanooga’s quality of life as electric power was in the 1930s or the Interstate system was in the 1950s. On top of that, it will help make electricity in our area even more reliable and affordable.”

What makes this initiative an interesting case study for the cities and local collectivities wondering if a FTTH network is worth the investments : it's a 160,000 inhabitants town, with a local economy that includes a diversified mix of manufacturing and service industries, four colleges, and several preparatory schools. According to Wikipedia : Chattanooga is the corporate headquarters of many mid-sized firms including bicycle manufacturer Litespeed  (looking for a titanium bike ? there you go ;-) and sustainable design company Tricycle Inc.. Many businesses in the banking and insurance industries run their operations from Chattanooga. The city is also home of large branch offices of  AT&T and UBS. In summary, Chattanooga is pretty similar to lots of european cities, take many Germany, UK, and France for instance, which might benefit from Fiber-To-The-Home too...

Back to DePriest announcement :

“A recent study by a group of professors at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and Tennessee State University suggests these economic and social benefits alone could top $600 million for Chattanooga over ten years.
Another study, verified by the Electric Power Research Institute, indicates that Fiber to the Home will also allow EPB to make significant improvements to its electric power distribution system. The infrastructure can help the company locate problems earlier, restore outages more quickly and gain efficiencies that are not currently available. It will also allow EPB to provide more tools to help customers reduce their power usage and cost.
The value to electric power customers in the form of reduced outages, energy conservation and other efficiencies is estimated at roughly $300 million over ten years, bringing Fiber to the Home’s total value to the community to nearly $1 billion over the course of ten years.”

Quite an interesting ROI, right ?...

See the video - and much much more - directly on EPB' s website here.
Read why the such an initiative always generates FUD here and here.

More on the lovely city of Chattanooga  here. Among many other key factors to make a city a nice place to live in, this :  "The city supports a downtown shuttle fleet of zero-emission electric buses -  manufactured here in Chattanooga - for commuters and visitors wishing to park-and-ride."

Post-Scriptum : for those of you who are too young to remember, here's why the title, and a pretty cool video to illustrate it.

Is The Fiber Magic Back ?

[updated Sat. 09/22]

At the recent ECOC European Conference and Exhibition on Optical Communication which closed its doors yesterday in Berlin, Germany, Alcatel-Lucent researchers delivered  post-deadline papers that remind me the good old days of the pre-Bubble era (i.e. when Marketing was not the ruler).

Among several outstanding breakthroughs (for fiberoptics technology- savvy guys ;-) : the transmission of 12.8 Tbit/s of data through a single optical fiber over a record distance of 2,550 km, and a 8-Tbit/s WDM transmission with 80 channels, each modulated at 100 Gbits/sec, transmitted over 520 km

A few facts for novices : a data rate of 1 Terabit per second represents roughly 12 millions telephone landlines; ten years ago, the transmission record was set around 3 Tbit/s, equivalent to approximately 40 millions lines; in late 2000, the record was at 6.5 Tbit/s, allowing the transmission of 1 million motion pictures over a single fiber at a time.

As stated by french pioneer and researcher Emmanuel Desurvire in his paper "Optical Communications in 2025", presented at ECOC'05 : " 20-years objectives can only be reached though tech-driven research and there is an urgent need to get started."
It seems AlcatelLucent got started again, leaving marketing behind the labs' s doors for the sake of the whole Fiber Optics industry.

GPON Deployment Forum

The Fiber Optics Industry keeps accelerating its pace towards  full recovery and  bright  sustainable future. The forthcoming "GPON Deployment Forum" organized by IIR Telecoms is a must-attend for all of you involved with FTTH Fiber To The Home networks.

GPON Deployment Forum is to be held Mon 03 Dec  - Thu 06 Dec 2007 at the Moevenpick Hotel, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Event detailled presentation here.
Event brochure here.
Registration here.

BroadBand Business Models 2.0

UK-based Telco 2.0 is running a market survey on the future business models in the Broadband arena. To participate, click here.
My take : IP, FTTx, and Web 2.0 are going to change the whole Telecoms landscape, with Telcos and ISPs and others to make money on services rather than on infrastructure.

Thanks Benoit for the heads up.

FTTH and Economic Development

This week could be the Week Of Broadband here in Europe, with the Apple+O2 deal on the iPhone in the UK, with ECOC'07, the european Fiber Optics conference & tradeshow in Berlin, Germany, and with Odebit'07, the Broadband conference in Paris, France.

Let's take this opportunity to go back to the fundamentals : why fiber is the only medium of choice when it's about delivering multimedia content instantly -  Here is an excerpt of the FTTH Council' s Feb.07 report : "Fiber To The Home, Advantages of Optical Access " :

Common sense suggests that communities with plentiful, reliable bandwidth available will do better than those without. FTTH-powered bandwidth is essential for:
•  Hometown businesses competing in a global economy.
•  Professionals and others who work at home.
•  Quality of life provided by online entertainment, education, culture and e-commerce.
•  Special services for the elderly and for shut-ins.
FTTH thus helps define successful communities just as good water, power, climate and transportation have defined them for millennia.

That’s obviously so for greenfield developments – the data, in previous sections of this report, show that fiber-equipped homes and offices sell faster, and command a price premium over real estate developments without fiber. But what about existing communities? Direct comparisons are admittedly difficult because FTTH has not been widely available until recently, but virtually all of the real-world economic studies have borne out the predictions; none has suggested otherwise.

By far the most comprehensive look at broadband’s impact is a 2005 study by William H. Lehr, Carlos A. Osorio, and Sharon E. Gillett at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Marvin A. Sirbu, from Carnegie Mellon University. It was funded by the Economic Development Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce and by the MIT Program on Internet & Telecoms Convergence (http://itc.mit.edu). The study found that broadband enhances economic activity, helping to promote job creation both in terms of the total number of jobs and the number of establishments. Broadband is associated with growth in rents, total employment, number of business establishments, and share of establishments in IT-intensive sectors.

There are also numerous case studies, comparing specific communities before and after public investment in broadband. A few examples:
•  One early study, of a municipal fiber network built in 2001 in South Dundas, Ontario, showed substantial benefits. It was prepared for the UK’s Department of Trade and Industry.
•  A 2003 study by D. J. Kelley comparing Cedar Falls, Iowa, which launched a municipal broadband network in 1997, against its otherwise similar neighboring community of Waterloo. Cedar Falls bounded ahead of its neighbor.
•  More recently, Ford and Koutsky compared per capita retail sales growth in Lake County, Florida, which invested in a municipal broadband network that became operational in 2001, against ten Florida counties selected as controls based on their similar retail sales levels prior to Lake County’s broadband investment. They found that sales per capita grew almost twice as fast in Lake County compared to the control group.

Similar patterns have emerged for communities using FTTH provided by private enterprise. Fort Wayne, Indiana, has taken good advantage of a Verizon FiOS investment there, for instance. And in February 2007, two big studies of housing sales in Massachusetts – where FiOS is coming on line in numerous communities – show a startling recovery. Sales are up, and prices are down only slightly (after a decade-long rise that makes housing there among the most expensive in the United States).

The data are clear and consistent: FTTH, whether provided by private or municipal organizations, is an economic plus for all communities, and an outright boon for many.
FTTH and Economic Development FTTH helps define successful communities just as good water, power, climate and transportation have defined them for millennia.

FTTH Council website here.
Full report here.

Also a must-read, the american online magazine Broadband Properties. Its baseline : "Building The Fiber-Connected Community".

Fibernews goes live !

[updated 09.14.07 @ 8:22PM CET]

Please welcome the new member of the Fibergeneration family : FiberNews !
FiberNews is a GoogleMap mashup, displaying FTTH Fiber-To-The-Home related news per their respective location.
See the previous post here.

Created with Yahoo!Pipes and GoogleMaps, of course.
The process is very simple :
1. get news feeds from different online news websites,
2. filter them on specific items, extract the location out of the press release or information,
3. get the corresponding output file as a KML file,
4. open it with GoogleMaps,
5. get the HTML code,
6. embed it in a blog post.

Next steps : a) add more news feeds - for the time being, that's only Fiber Optics Online and The New York Times, b) add a Yahoo!Maps display, to compare with Google's, c) test new ways to show information, as on Babelcast for instance.

You can see, use, and copy the fibernews pipe here. 
FiberNews webpage is here.

It's Time To Push The Pedal To The Metal

In other words,  Telcos are readiing their FTTH-Everywhere strategy. Read this.
(thanks to Benoit for the heads-up)

Fiber On Demand Goes Live !

I'm pleased to announce the release of my new weblog : " Fiber On Demand ".
Fiber On Demand displays all videos related to the FTTH Fiber To The Home technology available on the Net.

The first version, aka "beta" as usual, do aggregate content from YouTube and GoogleVideo. The actual query looks for all the files tagged "FTTH", without any further operation but filtering non-unique items, the results being combined into one single RSS feed.

To create Fiber On Demand "Beta", I've used only two tools, beside the TypePad platform of course : Yahoo!Pipes and Feed2JS. Total time spent to put together the actual version : less than 60 minutes, including 10 minutes to build and test the pipe, 20 minutes to test several options to display the RSS feed on a TypePad' weblog, and 20 minutes to create the current design of Fiber On Demand.

To get started, here is a comprehensive list of useful ressources :
- Yahoo!Pipes Blog
- Some Template Tips & Tricks blog
- 5 cool ways to use Yahoo!Pipes
- Yahoo! Pipes: Unlocking the Data Web  by Jeremy Zawodny

My "FTTH_videos" pipe is available here.  Developed from scratch - means it's not a clone of an existing pipe. Just to prove how easy it is to build your own app, even if you haven't put your hands on C++ since years (myself : was in the mid 90's, when I were a registered NeXT Developer ;-)
   
The next revision of Fiber On Demand will : a) exclude french-speaking videos, b) sort the videos by location.
Also, I'll do my best to  get embedded YouTube clips instead of vignettes.

Last but not least, I'm preparing another video blog, this one aimed at education on fiber optics technology. Stay tuned ;-)

post-scriptum : to go to Fiber On Demand, click on the link under "Blogging On Fibergeneration" in the right hand' sidebar.

UPDATE Aug. 27, 2007 : I will publish the step-by-step process in a future post (read : soon).

Fiber in Europe : Disruption Full Speed Ahead

A new business model is making its debuts in the Fiber-To-The-Home market. In " Europe Fiber futures: 40 Gbps to offices & 100 Mbps to homes ", VON' European Editor  Bob Emmerson explains what a Nordic telco, Lyse Tele, is currently doing with its customers. The real innovation : subscribers can lay the last meters themselves, in order to reduce the costs.
IMHO, this is the very first step towards a " Network 2.0 " approach, where the end-users will build their access networks according to their own needs. The technology is there, the tools are there.
Imagine the fiber network in your neighborhood as a giant  loop, open, always on, delivering enough bandwidth for the common applications and services - say 100Mbps -, onto which you can plug your terminal at will.
We just have to do it (I will come back on that one later).

The parent company of Lyse Tele is a utility that had and still has a core asset: an established billing relationship with millions of electricity users. In April 2002, they formed a subsidiary to enter the IPTV arena, so while the activity was brand new, the name was not. Moreover, this was a company that the market could trust, and that is something technology cannot create.

The company started with a clean sheet of paper. There were no legacy investments or services to protect. But to compete, they needed a visionary strategy and an offer that was not merely different but radically different. All service providers employ the same technologies, so the radically different visionary strategy and offer had to come by way of marketing.

Selling Before Building

Their go-to-market strategy is alarmingly simple: before you go anywhere, make sure there is a market. They make sure by creating it.
They could not realize differentiation over cable or copper. It had to be fiber. To justify the investment, the company set up meetings in the neighborhood. They provided a supervised play area for children, coffee, mineral water, and a presentation.

The basic pitch is also simple. The company will lay fiber to your home, and you get 100 Mbps IP access (minimum), IPTV and triple play services, and because the bandwidth is symmetric, you can also participate in a community of interest groups. But all of this can happen only after enough households sign up. Participants can sign up at the meeting or later, and they are encouraged to spread the message if they want the service.

It works. To keep costs down, subscribers can lay the last part of the network themselves. There’s a do-it-yourself kit, and they save €500 (US$630). Around 80% do the physical, self-provisioning part themselves.
Apart from saving money, subscribers who lay the fiber themselves feel that they own that part of the infrastructure. VoIP calls made within the broadband network are free. This part of the strategy minimizes churn, as does the decision to deploy symmetric access to facilitate the development of community services. It works. Upstream traffic exceeds downstream.

Paris Finally Gets Free fiber -- But Not The Kind You're Thinking

Exclusive report from fellow journalist & columnist Nicos Sarkolasy. [with typo corrected]

Between the nationwide decline explosion of municipal fiber projects and the stall huge perspective in Paris's FT fiber plans, it's not shocking to hear that other companies are coming up with their own homegrown solutions for the tech savvy city. The one that's been creating the most buzz in France over the last couple of days has been Fiber 2.0, with its audacious pledge to "free the broadband". With funding from Google and Sequoia Capital, the Biarritz, Euskadi-based company has recently announced its plans to expand its free coverage from the two Paris neighborhoods it currently blankets to an additional six communities within the city.

But here's the rub--even though Fiber 2.0 has been generous enough to donate the equipment, the deployment of the network relies heavily on volunteers. Although the company has seen success in providing free fiber in roughly 25 countries around the world, I wasn't sure how the service could become a viable way to connect with its sub-municipal scale and reliance on the generous and willing. To get the story straight, I had a brief chat with Fiber 2.0 CEO and Co-founder, Mark F. Billaud.

"We don't think of ourselves as being in competition with the FT deal," Billaud clarified during our phone conversation. "In many ways we serve a different market. We're not trying to be the backbone coverage for emergency services like police and fire departments, and that's a big part of what France Telecom and Orange are trying to do in Paris."

Ironically, I think Billaud touched on an important point while describing the role of Fiber 2.0's free service in a city setting. The availability of using the Web 2.0 and the ability to watch HD-TV on the go is what most of us associate with municipal fiber, but the truth is there's a much more complex element involved when the service is meant to become part of a city's infrastructure. Building out a speedy and adequately blanketed fiber network is not only expensive, but also a logistical nightmare when it comes to guaranteeing near flawless service for the public safety sector. Rather than trying to provide a de facto solution for all situations, Fiber 2.0's founders made the wise decision of focusing on enabling a community to buildout its own network for casual use.

There was still one thing that was bothering me--what's with the whole volunteer element? "Most of the people who contact us about volunteering are interested in doing their part by putting a booster on their windowsill," Billaud explained. "But we still encounter a fair share of people that are actually interested in sharing some of their unused bandwidth to provide connectivity for the community."

If the citizens of Paris can methodically build their own patchwork network, I'm left to wonder who really merits from the FT deal. But does Fiber 2.0 really have what it takes to even knockout a lot of the floundering muni-fiber projects out there? With all the bureaucratic red tape surrounding most muni projects it's possible, but the company would need a lot of visibility and a continuous supply of altruistic community to pull it off. Until progress is made with FT, or we see the rollout of WiMax/Xohm, I'm willing to give it a shot. It's not like it's going to cost me anything...

Fiber Optics Fellows, Get Ready For The Next Big Wave

" Cisco found that American video websites currently transmit more data per month than the entire amount of traffic sent over the internet in 2000. " This, and much more, into the article written by Matt Chapman of the Australian online magazine ITNews.

For the Telecoms Industry, this is the best news since the downturn : Finally, there is a real need for bandwidth.
It's a given that telcos, cable TV operators, and the remaining carriers' s carriers will have to build lots of new long haul networks pretty soon, for the actual infrastructure will start showing off its limits.
Let the big guys deploy their FTTH networks here, the CableTV folks upgrade to DOCSIS 3.0 there. Then, watch them struggle with the first Internet black-out, and you will see how quickly those new long-distance infrastructures will show up. So wonderful time ahead for the Fiber Optics fellows ;-)

post-scriptum : You may also read the original article published by Ars Technica last week : " Report: Cable companies facing big bandwidth crunch ".

(Thanks Bruno for the heads up)

Testing Fibers The Web 2.0 Way

Got to tell you : Testing 2.0 becomes real. Some much fun with all the Web 2.0 apps out there. Web-apps, not Client-apps, that's the key. Stay tuned, more to come next week.

About Innovation In Fiber Optics Technology

Japan Telco & R&D leader NTT was the first to come on the market with a new type of fiber aimed at Fiber-To-The-Home easy deployments. That is due to the fact that FTTH roll out started earlier in Japan than in the US. The question is : how about Europe, and France especially ? Local Telcos and ISPs seem not to be concerned by technics, and the local fiber optics industry has been almost wiped out after the crash, back in the early 2000's. So, no industry, no innovation, no innovation, no more industry. Time to do something, Mr President !

Why FTTH helps vendors to innovate

Worldwide leader Corning announced a breakthrough optical fiber technology, performing over 100 times better than standard fibers. The N.Y.-based fiber maker worked closely with Verizon to resolve FTTH installation challenges.

"This is a game-changing technology for telecommunications applications," said Peter F. Volanakis, president and chief operating officer at Corning. "We have developed an optical fiber cable that is as rugged as copper cable but with all of the bandwidth benefits of fiber. By making fundamental changes in the way light travels in the fiber, we were able to create a new optical fiber that is over 100 times more bendable than standard fibers." Corning's newest fiber technology achieves this while maintaining compatibility with industry performance standards, existing manufacturing processes and installation procedures. "So, customers don't have to sacrifice one benefit to get another," he said.

Now, the need for trained outside plant technicians is a bit less critical. The only issue still to be resolved : testing...

Fibre in the Last Mile in Europe

About broadband access : " Fibre in the Last Mile in Europe ", the recent report from Frost & Sullivan, published: 9 July, 2007.
F&S claims fibre-to-the-home deployments reached over 2.5 million homes in 2006 and estimates this to reach over 14.0 million in 2012.
There's still business to do in Fiber Optics ;-)

France : The Broadband Heaven ?

"French policy has nurtured competition among providers, advancing the country to the cutting-edge of broadband technology", writes BusinessWeek correspondent in Paris Jennifer Schenker in her article Vive la High-Speed Internet!

What a difference a few years make. In 2001, France had one of the weakest markets for broadband Internet access in the developed world, with less than a quarter of the penetration of the U.S. Today, it has sailed past the U.S. to become one of the world's most wired nations, with more than one in five inhabitants enjoying high-speed Internet connections.

What's even more interesting is what the French are doing with their fast hook-ups. According to tech research firm Analysys, a remarkable 52% of broadband connections in France today are used for voice-over-Internet protocol, or VoIP, phone calls—far and away the highest level in Europe and perhaps in the world. In Britain and Germany, by comparison, just 6% of broadband connections are used for VoIP.
The Battle of the Boxes

The French also have gotten off to a fast start in Internet TV. Analysys figures 2.6 million households in France now get TV over the Net using Internet protocol technology (IPTV). That's about 10 times the number using IPTV in Britain, qualifying France as the European leader in video-on-demand services.

How did the land of wine, cheese, and luxury goods become a world-beater in cutting-edge Net services? Part of the credit goes to what could be called the Battle of the Boxes. Paris and other cities are plastered with ads for state-of-the-art home Internet gateways—with names like Livebox, Freebox, Neufbox, and Dartybox—that offer connection speeds of up to 28 megabits per second, plus voice calls, TV, and Wi-Fi. They usually come for free with a monthly broadband subscription starting around €30 ($41).

This and much more in the full article here.
Comparison of pricing for consumer broadband in Europe here.

A True Truism

Ma Bell : same player shoot again ;-)

Looks Like It's Starting All Over Again

According to Forbes, ten small European optical-fiber network operators are to combine their infrastructure in an alliance called Euro-One. New entrants, new countries are involved (e.g. Czech Republic). It reminds me the pre-Bubble times, back in the late 90's, with all those alliances between telcos. I hope the new guys have learned from the mistakes of their predecessors. The good news is that the Internet has dramatically changed since 2000 : way more users, applications, usages, etc. It should help Euro-One to build an infrastructure that fits the actual needs of the customers. Note : maybe I will stay in the business. Perhaps someone at Euro-One needs my expertise ;-)

Fiber 101

For those of you who still wonder if optical fibers are made of recycled glass or beach' sand, this video from the Discovery Channel.

Comment faire la fibre optique
Uploaded by jeansergio

It's about testing your broadband access

" Testing the limits of the customer premises " was published a year ago by Tim McElligott on TelephonyOnline.com

The battle for the soul of the broadband customer goes on behind closed doors. But it's not all behind the doors to the development labs where ingenious engineers hatch super-secret capabilities. Nor is it all behind the doors to the central office from which all bandwidth flows. One of the biggest battles is being waged by technicians behind the doors to the den and to the family room.

“The home is the new frontier,” said Dave Holly, head of the cable networking division for JDSU. “It has dramatically changed what is being introduced to the network [by end users] as well as the portfolio of [test] tools we must develop and deploy.”

In this new frontier, the key to winning the broadband battle — not that there ever will be a clear-cut winner, only interchangeable market leaders — may depend on the weapons, or tools, with which service providers outfit their technicians.

With FTTH and FTTN implementations in full swing, significant changes are taking place in all aspects of network testing that will affect not just an upswing in the sale of test gear, but how, from where and by whom live networks and services are tested.

There are still those vendors looking for ways to “outfit the Super Tech,” said Peter Schweiger, business development manager for optical network test systems at Agilent. But he and others believe that may never happen. In some respects, the technologies are too numerous and complex for technicians to have command of them all. For the same reasons, it is untenable to have a single tool a tech can carry.

Test equipment manufacturers are trying to strike a balance between building what Schweiger calls the “minimum viable product” — a hand-held device with a couple of red and green lights that tests continuity and perhaps a little jitter and response time — and a full-blown analyzer that looks at Sonet, Ethernet and dense wave division multiplexing and acts as an optical time domain reflectometer and perhaps even POTS tester in the same box. He calls it, poetically, the difference between “tools for techs” and “instruments for engineers.”

Much more in the full article here.

The whole Testing 2.0 concept is right at the core of this article : for several different reasons, today's technicians need simple red & green lights tools to test the broadband access (and TriplePlay services) at the subscriber premise. Testing 2.0 goes even further : it's all about making tools for non-technicians.