Convergence Conversation

(Image copyright Lindsey Annison)
To try and bring together all those in the fibre sphere globally, today we started #fibrefriday on Twitter.

So, if you are involved in FTTH, anywhere in the world, add yourself to the list on Twitter by adding #fibrefriday to your Tweet. Then we can all share experiences, news, solve problems, and those of you with FTTH can brag about what you can do now that the rest of us haven't even heard of yet!

Following on from the Pacific Fibre comment earlier, I thought I'd just bring this article about undersea fibre and cable laying to your attention again.

No, it doesn't relate to all of our problems with poles, ducts, taxes etc but for anyone wishing to get a grasp of some of the issues which surround fibre it is required reading.

BTW can anyone, in a country other than the UK, please offer some input about taxes on fibre in YOUR country? Do you charge a tax on fibre, lit or unlit? Has it been waived to encourage FTTH? Does the incumbent pay less than any other provider, as in UK?

We would really welcome some information from other countries. More...

Quick round up of the latest breaking news. Please add your contributions so everyone can catch up over the weekend.


1. OK, first had to be the announcement about Pacific Fibre's plans to bring new fibre across the Pacific to New Zealand and Australia. Here we have an experienced group of entrepreneurs and businessmen (no woman in sight - I'll happily relocate if they need me to balance it out!) getting together to address an issue that is going to face many - next generation bandwidth.

As Oz and NZ governments push for FTTH, the backhaul available could increasingly become the bottleneck (very simple graphical explanation). More...

Once upon a time there were three little pigs - FTTC, Docsis 3 and FTTH.

The first little piggy set off into the wide world of broadband and built himself a cabinet. He was pretty confident that he could do everything required from there but along came the mean old big bad wolf – the consumer - and blew all of his plans out the water with apps and services he had never even heard of. FTTC simply couldn't do what everyone needed to. He ran to his friends and told them he'd underestimated the consumer, I mean, the Big Bad Wolf. His cabinet plans were in tatters.

Out went Docsis 3, confident he could resolve the problems and he told everyone he was doing it over fibre optics. More...

Posted by Guy Jarvis: Interesting post from Adrian Wooster of CBN that leaves as many questions unanswered as it offers concerning the "JON" concept -

Comment posted as follows:


Adrian,

To summarise your thinking into a single sentence then -

Public Sector pays a per home VLAN (de facto partial cost underpinning of overall connectivity provision) and this encourages the market to build out Next generation Access networks?

The idea has merit, so long as the principles of the open market apply and that said Public Sector order is not simply bundled into a single national or regional package, otherwise that would have the unintended consequence of market distortion. More...

Just to illustrate this point, take two minutes and watch this video. How many times do the white team pass the ball between each other? When you have the answer, come back here.....

Right, how many times did the white team pass the ball between each other??

Post your answers below.

Whilst I was in the States, I was told over and over again, "Don't call it 'broadband'- it's FTTH". The point being that what has been manipulated by telco marketing departments to be a meaningless nothing about speed, contention, services available etc (broadband) cannot hold a candle to what we are all aiming for.

I know there are 101 arguments for FiWi, or I would never have coined the term in the first place, but the reality is that what we are looking to do is not improve a struggling infrastructure incrementally, but go for a major step change instead.

I have just received two articles which bear reading on this matter. More...

How fast should your next generation internet connection be?

It's a simple enough question. In the last year I've heard answers ranging from 2Mbps right up to 1Gbps. Many people, when not burdened by the economics, seem to be in the 100Mbps camp these days. Perhaps that's because it seems like 100Mbps will be enough for the foreseeable future, but will it?

What does history show us? In 1990 there was nothing much more than simple text flying around the internet that required little bandwidth. Back then, how many of us predicted the arrival of social media sites like FaceBook and Flickr, or the BBC iPlayer or NetFlix? Was the advent of broadband a necessity because of sites like YouTube, or was YouTube a response to the newly available bandwidth?

In 2001 I bought a 2GB hard drive for my computer. More...

Getting a bit confused about all the new developments? Trying to build a FTTH network for your village, hamlet, community, region, town, country and don't know where to start?

The Third Edition of the FTTH Council EU FTTH Guide should be your first port of call to gen up on all things FTTH.

There will be a short test on Monday. Have a good weekend!

Classic post about planning the future around gigabit networks, in which Lev Gonick refers to JFK's "We choose to go the Moon" speech in 1962.

With our proposed USC of 2Mbps (up to or at least, we don't know yet) instead of a Korean level USO of 1GBps by 2012, the taxing of NGA assets (wireless and fibre) instead of waiving the tax to get the infrastructure in place, a national failure to create a sustainable long-term plan and hence budget to deliver instead of a forward thinking plan to bring us into the game, are we by any chance trying to create a trip to the Moon with multiple re-fuelling stops en route, instead of aiming as high as we can?

Why are our aspirations so low in this country that no political party has yet come out and said, "Gigabit or Bust" as part of their electioneering? You would be roundly cheered if you did so! If this country is to be Great again, we must aim for the moon. More...