Interview: Karel Helsen, FTTH Council Europe

This article originally appeared on fibresystems.org.

Karel Helsen is a busy man. Not only does he run the broadband communications business at fibre maker Draka, but he has just taken on a new job as the president of the FTTH Council Europe for the next two years. Hailing from Amsterdam, a city that’s often viewed as the showcase for fibre-to-the-home in Europe, Helsen appears to have the perfect credentials for the job. But what exactly does he have to do? Pauline Rigby finds out.

PR: Could you explain your role in the Council, and also how it differs from that of the director general.
KH: The president’s role is chairing the board of directors of the council and being a spokesperson to the outside world, that’s also something that I share with Hartwig [Tauber, director general]. I would say that Hartwig’s role is more managing the committees, making sure that what we do in terms of activities is well guided, and making sure that the strategies and goals we have set are going to be met. My role is chairing the board but also looking to the outside world, speaking to the press, speaking to industry organizations, and lobbying for the council.

How has the FTTH scene in Europe been affected by the global economic crisis?
When we saw the forecast that we asked Heavy Reading to conduct, we saw that there is likely to be a little bit of slowdown in the growth. Last year it was predicted that we would have around 15 million subscribers in 2012; now it’s been forecast more in the area of 12-13 million.

How it’s going to turn out, well nobody knows, but we can see there are still more projects going on. We see some growth in Scandinavia, we also see more initiatives in Eastern European countries, and over the last year there are also more initiatives in the Middle East. From that perspective we see that growth is continuing. You might expect a slowdown due to the economic crisis, but we think it’s too early to say.

Regulation seems to be a hot topic right now. Can you tell me some more about the Council’s work in this area.
It’s a very interesting topic, but it’s also a very complex topic. The recommendation that we gave last year was quite a complex paper — we sent in more than 30 pages — and that paper was the basis for the public recommendation. If you read the document [on next-generation access] from the European Commission, for the first time it mentions fibre.

Regulators have realized that fibre technology cannot be compared apples to apples with another network like DSL or cable because of the capacities that fibre networks offer. You can’t treat this new technology with old rules. That’s really a big step forward.

Our approach of having regional differentiation in broadband policy is also something that is becoming accepted more and more with the European Commission. There are three types of regions regarding fibre-to-the-home and the level of necessary influence.

In the typical open areas in the big cities, the market itself should be able to regulate and also to set up fibre networks; there should be enough competition. On the other hand in the rural areas, it is very difficult to make sure that fibre-to-the-home is happening everywhere, so in these areas it would be necessary to find public money to make sure fibre is installed there, and to avoid the digital divide.

We also have defined the in-between case: medium cities which are too small to be seen as an open area and too big to be seen as a rural area. For those there might be some trigger actions necessary to make sure fibre networks are deployed there. If you look at recommendations and also public consultations of the European Commission, you will find several of these ideas also in the paper.

What do you see as the main challenges for the Council over the next couple of years?
You know that we started as an organization with pioneers mainly coming from the passive and active suppliers side, so there was not so much financial know-how inside the Council. The bigger corporate members do have business [acumen] of course, but real expertise from the financial side is lacking.

I perceive it as a goal for the Council to get more people from financial institutions into our Council and onto our business and financial committee to help us provide clearer guidelines on how to stimulate the roll out of fibre networks with the insight of the business case.

There is another element, it’s a challenge but it’s a nice challenge, and that’s to attract new members and partnership towards our Council. We have been growing very fast: we have over 100 members now, mainly coming from the technical side, the construction side and academia, as well as the vendors from the passive and active equipment side.

We have the fibre and now the awareness is there, it’s good to explore what to do with the fibre. Consumers and business who would use the fibre want to know about the applications and services going over the fibre. So we would like to take a look at companies such as Walt Disney, Universal, Sony, Nintendo, and so on, to see if there are possibilities for partnerships.

We already have a new submission from a company coming from the gaming side who would like to help us set up within the Council a committee on gaming and entertainment, to show what you can do with the fibre in this application.

What other application areas is the Council targeting?
Medical and health applications are also a very interesting area. We recently conducted a telehealth study [with Dutch consulting firm M&I Partners]. The disappointing fact is that there are many many telehealth applications or projects out there which limit themselves due to the fact that broadband is not available to a large part of the telehealth community. When you talk about real telehealth projects that benefit from fibre, there are just a few pilots, one is in Canada, one is in Sweden, another is in the Netherlands.

These projects are at the beginning, but the results are very positive, and show great potential. Now it is necessary to put the infrastructure in place to support them.

This is one more driver for the public sector to really go for fibre. For healthcare applications you really need political backers. The whole economy can benefit from it, because healthcare will be one of the most critical systems in the coming years as people in Europe get older and older.

I think we have done a tremendous job of putting fibre on the agenda in the countries at the European Commission level, even with governments. That’s a great basis to further widen the council now, and to welcome new partners coming from the content side, the applications side, and from the financial side.

I believe that bringing these worlds closer together will help to stimulate the roll out of fibre-to-the-home. Sustainability, regulation, and also widening the scope of our Council — that’s the big strategy that we would like to follow for the next couple of years.

Reproduced with permission. © Institute of Physics and IOP Publishing Ltd.