JFDI rural FTTH connects its first users.

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Read more! Some things just make you cheer!

As some of you may know, I went out to the USA in January 2010 to meet projects who were doing FTTH in innovative ways, as well as in rural areas. I was privileged and honoured to be invited by Geoff Daily and Tim Nulty to the community FTTH event in Salt Lake City, hosted by Todd Marriott of Utopia, and to meet many of the people who have helped me fight for rural FTTH. Some of those people changed my life, becoming true friends in the process.

This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com




I discovered you could buy multi-city flights which worked out far cheaper than direct flights, and was lucky enough to visit the Deep South, as well as the frozen north. That decision may be key to other choices which are now open to rural communities in the UK - more on that another time.

Actually, it was far warmer in Utah, Chicago and Denver than the UK at that point! Minus 17 when I left Cumbria. Snow and ice at Heathrow meant the first flight was cancelled with only hours to go and I had to purchase American Airline flights as British Airways did the British thing and ran scared of the snow. It was hovering around zero in the north of America! Warm and toasty ;)

Tim Nulty and I had exchanged many, many emails by this point and I couldn't wait to meet him. His project with ECFiber had become a goal: not just to visit, but to emulate. And Utopia has been on my 'must visit' list since it launched. Todd was a simply incredible host, even if he was convinced he would never get me out of that broadband bus!

The emails recently, after a lengthy 2 years where I have learnt far more about American politics, funding, municipal bonds and much more than I ever expected to, are the icing on the cake. They JFDI!! Well done ECfiber.

ECFiber Goes Live!

SOUTH ROYALTON – Having completed its beta testing, and with the Phase I project nearly complete, ECFiber began connecting its first customers today. Eight customers have been beta-testing the system for the past two weeks, getting sustained 5Mbps symmetrical service.

The Barnard General Store, one of the beta sites, has been offering the experience to customers via WI-FI, and has been finding folks on their doorstep at all hours, trying out the system.

“It’s been amazing,” says Kim Furlong, one of the store’s proprietors. “Because so much more of what we do is online, it is truly a joy to reap the reward of high-speed internet. Dial-up, and even satellite, is such a time-robber. Fiber is very different – you can be more efficient, and that is exciting. At the same time, I have some trepidation. People are going to relocate here more permanently because of what is available, and that is probably going to change the fabric of the community.”

According to Project Coordinator Leslie Nulty, 15 new accounts were opened within the first 24 hours after the doorstep delivery of information packets. Barnard Academy, another beta site, is also very excited about the service. They are planning an open house and community celebration of ECFiber’s arrival in mid-October.

Barnard was chosen for the Phase I project because of its proximity to the central office and its large number of unserved users. Pre-registrations topped 90% before the project started. Phase II, to build out the rest of the town of Barnard, is in the planning stages, with an informational meeting set for Thursday night at 7PM at the Barnard Town Hall.

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ECFiber is a group of 23 towns working to build a community-owned, subscriber-funded Fiber-to-the-Home network to provide phone, television, and ultra-high-speed internet services to 100% of the homes and businesses in the member towns.

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The problems faced by the project have been strikingly similar to UK project problems. Promises of the Subsidy (BDUK etc in the UK) funding led many to believe in pots of gold at the end of rainbows. Far too many think that established telcos will provide, even when faced with overwhelming evidence that such has not been the case in the last decade (read: 50+ years in America and Britain where the original telecom networks were often initiated, just as other utilities such as electricity and water, by the communities themselves).

Untold hours of passionate volunteers' lives have been wasted with the promise of public funding, just as they are now in the UK. Until finally, one day, you wake up and say: Let's JFDI! (That was one of the best emails I have had from Tim and Leslie!)

But ECFiber didn't go for an interim FiWi solution. We did talk about this at length in 2009/2010, but the figures simply do not stack up. This determination from the word go to deliver FTTH is more than just laudable - it is sustainable too. Especially for those communities that ECFiber connects. There is no need now to find yet more funding, somewhere down the road, to build a FTTH network to remote and far flung properties.

Watch this space for more news of US-UK collaboration and a colloquium in mid-September that you simply cannot afford to miss........
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Bringing Utopia to Eden

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Read more! WRITTEN BY GUY JARVIS: At the BDUK Industry Day last Thursday, potentially the most important announcement was, perhaps surprisingly, not the three market testing areas (quite what there is to test about the engineering and economics of FiWi deployment that is not already known is unclear - the challenge to date has been funding the build phase)


This blog post can be read at http://5tth.blogspot.com

The most interesting announcement was the forthcoming Cumbria Conference to be held over the weekend of 18th/19th September in Penrith and hosted by Rory Stewart, newly-elected MP for Penrith and the Border.

The objective is bold and the timing is right:

The Government Coalition has a big idea, Building the Big Society, and one of the great things about broadband, that Rory and his team have begun to realise, is that it provides a focus for local communities to come together and bring about a common benefit, in the form of the 4th Utility.

The 4th Utility is shorthand for:

World Class - a moving and ever improving target - Kaizen is the key word, continuous gradual improvement

Killer cap is the killer app - eliminating the need to consider the availability of sufficient speed and quality of service is the definition of the 4th Utility.

A future proof telecommunications access infrastructure in the First Mile which makes concerns about network capacity are a thing of the past - speed becomes an irrelevance.

Communities at a Parish-by-Parish level should have the opportunity to make an informed choice of alternatives for how their 4th Utility is delivered and on what terms.

Building the Big Society

Is Building the Big Society an approach that will enable local communities to secure their Digital Futures?

Perhaps, so long as the process of localism, handing power to local communities to make their own decisions, is genuine.

The important point to understand is that the engineering and economic cost delivery models are finalised - the supply side of FttH and FiWi is settled.

And the proposition is simple.

If your community is ready to demand its world-class future-proof 4th utility then the economic model already exists for any capable service provider to seek to establish and deliver that service.

An interesting aspect of the CIC approach is the locking of the FttH assets so that they cannot be sold on to other than CIC alternative owners without the express direction of the CIC Regulator.

Governance is the long term determinant of the terms of trade balance, in other words, who owns the network determines the deal on offer to customers.

CIC is all about preventing the existence of divergent objectives, all about creating a positive nexus, a common set of interests, of shared purpose, between monopoly access supplier and local community of customers (digital consumers and creators both)

Best Value Taxpayer Funding

Where taxpayer funding for market testing projects misses the point is that it is promoting and rewarding a promise.

Better to derisk the proposition by rewarding delivery and look to standardisation not competition in access infrastructure and it is the governance structure that matters

Why does the Community Interest matter?

Such a valuable and natural monopoly as the 4th utility, a service that has an expected operational life at least equal to that of the copper wire metallic path telephone system i.e. the rest of this century, needs careful thought and informed action now to ensure the interests of present and future generations are foremost.

Better for a nexus between supplier and customer by design than allowing an adversarial relationship to emerge by doing nothing to challenge the telecoms status quo.

What is required to complete the 4th Utility jigsaw and realise world-class connectivity across the UK is for local communities to be positioned to make informed choices.

Choices about what happens after these new networks are built, how are they governed and in whose interests - shareholders, customers, both and if so in what proportion - do people come first or profits?

Provide each community champion with an information pack - can in a box - that identifies the actuality in their locality and the options available.

Regardless of our day jobs we are all 4th Utility customers

To maximise the benefits and compete globally, as customers, what matters, the test of success, is achieving the value for money at a price point that does not restrict accessibility for all.

This not to say that everyone must directly pay for service either.

There are transformational government services that may in themselves warrant providing 4th Utility access free at the point of use

When the savings on reduced transactional costs, e.g. on freeing up hospital space earlier by enabling independent living, outweigh the cost of access then it makes sense to provision that access free at the point of use.

This helpfully solves Martha's Race Online 2012 problem too.

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Convergence + Divergence = FiWi

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Read more! Only a few days ago, someone very techy I have known for a long while said during a conversation about fat pipes, "I still haven't worked out what the killer app will be". My instant response was video as I strongly believe that we are heading towards a virtual reality scenario where making a video call will become as natural as making a mobile call now is for the vast majority of the world. Perhaps we should call this 'virtual naturality'?

This blog post can be read at http://5tth.blogspot.com


However, we should not even be thinking of the term "killer app" any more. The term came from the world of commerce who saw it as the golden goose which would lay the most profitable egg. It comes from a boom and bust, bubbly world that focuses on money before all else. It came from a need to 'justify the Internet' - how bizarre that sounds today?

From a network point of view, the killer app has also potentially had a less positive feel - could there be an app that would break the network? Some of us have always hoped that there was as it would highlight the inefficiencies and design faults within the core network and mean it would need to be fixed before ere long and hence remove that bottleneck and break the scarcity model once and for all!

Killer App becomes Killer Cap, as in capacity, capability?

I digress...I have been thinking about convergence and divergence recently. Convergence because we are all seeing new devices etc which overlap and bring unexpected features and functionality into easy reach. Divergence because we are moving away from expected models and futures because of the convergence.

For those of us who have been banging on about Fibre To The Home, fat pipes, and FiWi (increasingly), there has never been a need for a single killer app to prove our point that people need to be able to do precisely what they want to do over a network wherever they are, whenever they choose to and however they want to do it.

People will do what they choose and applications will rise and fall in popularity, meaning that the network must be sufficiently capable of dealing with the vagaries of human nature and differing interests far more than it needs to be able to cope with a killer app. (It also needs to cope with "consumers are also creators", and asymmetry is the biggest problem here once people have sufficient bandwidth and the devices to share what they have created.)

However, convergence has meant that the mobile phone has taken a starring role in driving forward application development and hence network usage. Mobiles have introduced more people to technology than computers have. Whilst digital video cameras may be expensive, the video on your mobile is usually more than sufficient to 'capture a moment' and MMS, Bluetooth etc have meant sharing it, whether via the Internet eg Youtube, Facebook etc or directly to another handset, is something that most people can master reasonably easily.

And herein lies the divergence, and, to me, the importance of FiWi. FiWi is Fibre ---> Wireless. (Many people forget that a mobile phone is a wireless device but for the purpose of this article, wireless also encompasses all the different uses of the wireless spectrum - wi-fi, Wimax (RIP?), GSM etc.)

A fat pipe is required for backhaul and the core network. There are no two ways about that, especially as our data transport requirements soar by the hour. If you cannot send enough packets through the network, consumers will moan. And rightly so. However, where the fat pipe reaches to only becomes an issue if the device and application(s) at the end of the first mile e.g. under the consumer's fingertips are using bloated code.

Mobile applications have necessarily used tight programming and compression techniques. Firstly, because of the internal memory limitations of the device, but also because the mobile network has limited capacity. The spectrum is a finite resource. You can't be letting people send 20 photos of granny's birthday party which are all 50MB, f'r instance.

But web applications have been developed with increasing amounts of memory eg in personal computers and servers, and increasing amounts of bandwidth available to the consumer to send or receive data. This has allowed web programmers to become 'lazy'. Why develop awesome compression techniques for videos if the connectivity a typical consumer has can handle what is already existent, and the likelihood is that this connectivity is only going to get fatter?

WAP was a much-maligned protocol but actually it was thinking along the right lines. People are going to use wireless to access the Net. More so now than ever before as the convergence becomes inherent in our thinking. iPads, iPods, smartphones and even your average £10 mobile handset can all access the Net. The idea that to do so would require you to plug in to any type of socket is now anathema to all of us.

Whether the wireless is in the first inch ie the wireless access point that spews wireless around your house or in the Bluetooth you use to share your photos, or the first mile ie to overcome technical difficulties with laying a fixed line solution, or even a satellite connection (which is also wireless), if you then connect this to fibre, you have the answer to the problem.

What problem? Oh, well, that'll be how to get fibre as close to every single human as possible.

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Why FiWi matters in the UK

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Read more! There are no two ways about it, and little argument from industry, government or consumers and community. In order to deliver Digital Britain, we need FiWi. That is, fibre as close to every home and business as possible, and wireless in the few places where that is not physically possible.

On such an issue as the fourth utility, finances do not come into it. However, there are always going to be places where fibre is just too difficult to provision and where wireless actually makes far more sense as being the right technology for that job.

There needs to be a Universal Service Obligation that applies to broadband exactly as it does water and electricity. Not "Best effort" depending on what your books look like and your shareholders think, but an OBLIGATION to get that utility to EVERYONE.

And not some half-hearted attempt that suits the world of commerce eg 2Mbps asymmetrical. That is NOT broadband and there is plenty to show now that asymmetry is not what people seek.

Broadband goes way beyond who is making money out of it. It is a UTILITY. There are some who still don't get it. Fine, they will, worry not. You can't escape the pervasive incursion of the internet into our daily lives, and as the public sector eg health and education realise the massive advantages, improved services and cost-savings that can be made by using broadband technology, it will become ever more pervasive and inescapable in every aspect of our world.

FiWi is key to bringing Britain into the digital age, engaging this country into the digital economy, creating 'digital citizens'. It is not some airy fairy pie in the sky notion, although I have been saying FiWi Pie for years to illustrate that there is a piece of this pie for everyone.

However, if we set the bar so low that a huge swathe of the country is reliant on wireless rather than fibre, we are doing ourselves no favours, now or in the future. The reality is that the future is FIBRE, and ignoring that fact, or shoving it under the carpet, won't make it go away.

The FiWi mix needs to be heavily skewed towards fibre, with wireless giving us the opportunity to connect the remaining few, as well as providing a wireless cloud so that everyone everywhere can connect using their wireless device. I'll say it again - wireless should not be the core technology used as the primary connection mechanism, except in a very few and exceptional places in this country.

This country needs to work together to deliver what is required, not just by our generation but by the NEXT GENERATION. It means thinking and working together to find the right solutions. Not allowing commerce to take the lead or set a glass ceiling for its own ends. Not allowing government to stymie innovation whilst it pads out the very depleted coffers. Not allowing communities to suffer at the expense of either of the aforementioned. Not ignoring the very real grassroots and industry expertise available in this country, purely to win votes or cash in.

What we need in this country is CO-OPERATION between all the stakeholders to get on with fibre and JFDI. Anyone who thinks 2Mbps is sufficient now, in 2012 or beyond, will either need to sit on the sidelines and watch, or change their thinking, fast.

Britain needs people who get IT. Who understand the scale of the task we need to undertake to firstly catch up with other countries and then, hopefully, to compete or surpass them. And who realise the time for meetings, quangos and conferences, talking about and extolling the virtues of 'true broadband' but resulting in little action, is over.

Work together and we could have a world class infrastructure our children will be proud of. Ignore the issues and continue with each party selfishly pursuing its own ends and agendas, and we will end up with a nationwide disaster that impacts every single sector of our country.


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Non-metallic networks

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Read more! Whilst I can't agree with the seeming reliance on mobile operators to deliver the up to 2Mbps USO that was in Carter's Report recently, I think I may have finally found a way to explain FiWi to people, which I do believe is the future next gen solution.

It's all about non-metallic networks.

No metal. Dead easy.

The future has to be about a simple, redundant means to connect people that doesn't involve anything to do with copper, aluminium, coax or any other metallic medium.

You build a decent network with FTTH that has no bottlenecks etc and then over the top of it, you put a wireless (mesh) that solves the mobility, smart meter connections, ubiquity and all the rest of it issues.

The more I have thought about this the last few days and weeks, the more it seems to me that once we get rid of the metal, we will be closer to the right solution. "Next generation access or network" is a term which should only be used if it excludes entirely any metallic bits. Not in the CPE etc obviously but in the cable/wires etc which make up the network.

So, next time anyone says next gen to you, query the metallic content of the solution. If there is any, it isn't next generation.








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making FiWi happen: Google espouse white spaces

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Read more! When arguing for the use of the digital dividend for affordable wireless broadband on the panel last year at the Oxford new media event (as against for HDTV or mobile use) some of the attendees questioned whether such a thing would be possible. Nice to see Google advocating it too but in a more ubiquitous way - of course!This is precisely the level of tech and thinking that could help make FiWi happen deep into rural areas in the UK. And use some of the unused spectrum.

I seem to remember that not too many years ago, James Stephens of Consume.net came back from an event in Copenhagen talking about how use of the white noise spectrum could extend wifi networks' capacity substantially. This seems to me to be similar thinking and a potential solution to consider for FiWi. Read more!

"Worst is first" FTTH call from Ofcom

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Read more! Anna Bradley (Ofcom Consumer Panel) reiterates what she said, with Ashley Highfield (BBC) and others, at the BSG conference.

The broadband have-nots should leapfrog everyone else in getting FTTH / NGA.

Hearty applause from me, and undoubtedly many, many others who have struggled to be heard for so long. We have been saying this for over a decade now, since long before broadband became a household word, ADSL trigger levels and so on. Our Notspot report in 2005 also generated more than enough evidence to show this was required, economically for rural business and public sector service provision, and socially.

As a consumer of this pathetic service our dear regulator and incumbent(s) are apparently legitimately allowed to call "broadband" (to many consumers' disgust), I hope we will now see advances towards resolving a problem of national import, and which is having dire social and economic impact.

If anyone has any doubts about this 'worst is first' theory (with compliments to Sagentia for coining the term), I strongly urge you to pick up the JFDI Community Broadband books. I didn't write them alone. They are the words and experiences of communities who put their own first gen broadband in place, where the telcos refused to tread for precisely the same reasons they are citing now for not doing FTTH / NGA, and clearly illustrate why FTTH / NGA is required in rural areas FIRST.

NOT FTTC, let's make that clear. FTTC is NOT, and never will be, NGA.

The copper in rural areas is, in many cases, aged, appalling or aluminium. For FTTH / NGA purposes, it is entirely obsolete, useless, and better value sold on the open market, as Peter Cochrane first suggested way back when. The first hint of rain and our supposed broadband connections can and do dither at less than dial up speeds. There are many who don't even have this privilege though - I can introduce you to hundreds, if not thousands of them, who haunt my inbox.

There should be no concessions made to keep the copper in the first mile, whatsoever.

Whatever the cost to whomsoever does the copper replacement for rural FTTH, it is as nothing to the benefits to be reaped bringing "health, wealth and learning" opportunities across the digital divide. And hence the economic benefit to UK PLC.

Those of us behind Community FTTH, 5TTH and FiWi Pie are within an ace of making announcements about sustainable "Worst is First" broadband development and opportunities. Thank you, Anna. Your timing is impeccable!

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