The energy and thinking behind the paradigm shift

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Read more! Graham Small of AFL Fujikura has contributed after he 'let slip' that AFL Fujikura were involved in the Chattanooga smart grid.

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



Unless you have been off-planet, you will know by now that Chattanooga in Tennessee launched a 1Gbps network on 13th Sept to residents and businesses. It has been a collaboration between the electricity company, the community and a global fibre company. It shines the light for every other country, region and community to follow.

Graham writes:

When the utility companies get together with high tech fibre companies then real paradigm shifts can occur….

We have a huge communications and utilities infrastructure in the UK that reaches just about everyone in our nation. Every utility we have provides some means of delivering an optical fibre into someone’s home. Some are tried and tested – a physical drop into a customers premises via duct or aerial means, via the water system (mains or waste) or via the mains gas (optical fibres are inert, non-radiating or likely to produce sparks). The associated trunk infrastructure provides the ideal highway for core and backhaul if we have the wit but to utilize it. BT isn’t the network – there are alternatives!

Once every home has an optical fibre then the possibilities are endless. From the utilities perspective this is an ideal medium for “smart metering” and a huge cost saving in sending a ‘man in a van’ to every household to check the gas, electricity or water meter. We already have bundling of gas, electricity and telephony through utility providers so why not the fourth utility? Indeed, do we even need computers to enable the internet? Cloud computing suggests that we don’t necessarily need our clunky old PC to do everything we want to do “on line”; how about “Smart TV” that provides a fully integrated communications platform offering Telepresence and truly Unified Communications?

This is the dawn of the age of the Stupid Network. Fibre is the conduit that can provide the catalyst for a new age. Think Caxton’s printing press through to the age of manned space flight. We are at the start of another exponential growth spurt breaking down barriers between people, communities and countries; between the voters and their Governments; between health professionals and their patients; between entertainers and the entertained.

OK people, let’s get smart - the view that connecting people to the internet is all about Facebook and Foxy Bingo is dead wrong. It is the catalyst for social evolution and a template for building an Arthur C Clarkian utopia. The industrial revolution was a catalyst for major social change, fuelling the brawn drain from rural communities to the “dark satanic mills”. The communications revolution will fuel a mass migration back, mitigating the need for mass conurbations and providing opportunity for our talented youth to develop 21st century businesses based on 21st century technology.

It takes a BIG Government to enable a truly BIG Society if it can appreciate the BIG picture!



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A patchwork of solutions

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Read more! In an ideal world, the UK would perhaps pursue a national, integrated FTTx network. However, that is unlikely as no-one currently can decide who would pay for it, let alone own it, what technology to use, where and when to start etc etc. It would seem we may well be back to the 'patchwork of solutions' of not only first generation broadband, but also first generation electricity and water supplies (where local communities took it into their own hands to provide the services required locally) in order to bring Britain up to speed...

Looking at the many different solutions employed elsewhere eg Skelleftea, Nuenen, Korea, Utah etc etc, there would seem to be no single, right model for FTTx deployment. Just as we have seen with centralisation of government services, once you move away from local deployment you can end up with a 'one size fits all' that doesn't actually fit anyone.

Whilst there may well be a 'one size fits all' solution-idea that will work in the UK germinating already, the truth is that, without the incumbent, or other major investor, likely to make the first leap into the £15bn hole in the ground that a single, national fibre infrastructure requires, the thinking in this editorial "islands of Fibre" may become the standard in 2008/9. As it has been before, historically and more recently.

As we have seen with community networks etc, this course deviates considerably from incumbent level and government thinking, which has allowed market failure (and the considerable social and economic effects of that) to happen before action is taken.

FTTx costs have been reducing massively over the last few years, and installing a local fibre network, whether that is to a hamlet, village, market town, housing development, or urban area is now within the reach of even the tightest purse strings.

We are seeing local councils seize the initiative to 'unbundle' themselves from the incumbent before the incumbent decides what course they will take eg in Bournemouth with H20, and inevitably there are discussions in other council chambers, parish councils, RDAs and even pubs, as communities decide on what fibre action is appropriate locally and how to proceed.

The success of "Dig where you live" type projects rings a bell within the living memory of many communities who provided their own water supplies etc prior to the creation of the national Water Board (1970s?).

Taking some level of control for what is now deemed as essential an utility as water or electricity, resonates within communities, especially rural ones, who have felt the effects of centralisation most acutely. This consumer empowerment seems to have evaded the understanding of telcos, and even government departments such as BERR and Defra, who fail to comprehend the changes that such localisation can have on a community. This is one area I explored in both JFDI Community Broadband network books, and the impact of such local involvement in FTTx networks has been clearly documented by others elsewhere.

Whether having diverse networks will provide the best long-term solution for FTTH Britain is difficult to tell, but as Malcolm Matson of the OPLAN Foundation regularly says,"Let many flowers bloom".

Photo by Pedrosimoes7

Lilypads do of course seem the most logical photo for this article, and for further reading one could place a few jigsaw pieces in front of you to build the picture up a little, (join the dots, as it were) such as:
Negroponte's famous article about frogs and lilypads
Freifunk's Fiwi Mesh Solution (AFAIK there is now fibre within the Freifunk network as well as mesh)
And, of course, no self-respecting telco blog would be complete without The Rise of the Stupid Network by Dave Isenberg.













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