In their own words “Bell Labs threw a party and everybody came” – and most journalists (and I confess that I was one of them) didn’t seem to appreciate that this was the birthday of a dry, scientific paper rather than the creation of a working device a few years later.

However, the “phoney fortieth”* did lead me, eventually, to the account of the very first laser. Ten years later I wrote an editorial column recounting the various anniversaries taking place in the summer of 2008. It was 150 years since the first transatlantic cable, 50 years since the publication of Schawlow and Townes’ famous paper on the theory of the laser, and 20 years since the two ideas – transatlantic cables and lasers – had come together in the form of the first fibre-optic cable to span the ocean.

Thanks to that editorial I met Larry Johnson, founder of US training firm The Light Brigade, who is working on a project to archive the history of optical communications. Larry wanted to set the record straight – he pointed out that Theodore Maiman was the name that everyone should remember in conjunction with the laser because he’d been first to actually build one. Larry put me in touch with Kathleen, wife of the late Dr Maiman, who died in 2007.

Kathleen met Maiman in 1984 on a flight back from the ceremony in which he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Now she speaks in his place at conferences and special events to celebrate the creation of the first laser. In our conversation, it became clear that she misses her late husband with the kind of intensity that time does little to diminish.

The following is an extract from my interview with Kathleen:

PR: Are you a scientist too?
KM: No I’m not. I really more know Ted on the personal level, but I saw him work and how he calculated and recalculated and how he checked. He didn’t just take what was written to be necessarily accurate and correct; he re-measured other peoples work and calculations. I saw him do that. He didn’t take anything at face value. That was one of his traits, to be a doubting Thomas, not to assume anything.

Since Ted died a couple of people have wanted to share with me what they observed about Ted, working with him as a scientist. And they all seem to say the same thing, that Ted was not stopped by what others thought, he wasn’t limited. Even with politics I could see how he could understand both sides of the issue, rather than take the side of one and not to understand or consider the side of another.

PR: What lead Ted to be interested in the laser work in the first place?
KM: Ted got the love of science from his father who was a very creative electrical engineer. In their home as a young boy he was taught science and he excelled. He and his father were always, I have letters between him and his father in college working out certain kinds of problems, and writing back and forth, of course that wasn’t the work that was about the laser, but it was part of his science background.

He had many interests, he had broad interests but there were certain areas where he could go so deep. It astounded me the perspectives, the understanding that he would go to, the level he could go. So in a way it doesn’t surprise me that he could take on a project like the laser that well known scientists had already been discouraged [from pursuing]. Because the physics changes about halfway between microwave and laser, there’s very different physics, and so for those reasons they were giving up. But Ted, there was something so tenacious about him. He didn’t like it when he heard, “Oh that’s not possible”. He’d want to know why that wasn’t possible.

PR: Can you describe some of the events leading up to Ted’s discovery of the laser?
KM: When he was at Hughes that was his first important job. He was hired as a research scientist, and he was interested in moving not just a small percent higher in the electromagnetic spectrum, but actually making that quantum leap, from microwave to laser. But Hughes didn’t believe that it could be done, because at the time the labs of the world were giving up on lasers, even Bell Labs was taking down their apparatus.

Ted had a very hard time at Hughes [pursuading them to let him do the work], but he was convinced that he had a workable way of making a laser, of making coherent light. He knew he could do it. So the Army Corps of Engineers at that time had asked for a maser to be made, the idea was to make it more practical because it was 5000 lb. The agreement made between Hughes and Ted Maiman, was he deliver the maser for the Army Corps of Engineers, and if he was successful, he would be given 9 months and $50,000 to actually make coherent light.

He went to work to make the maser more practical, took it from 5000 lb to 2.5 lb and also improved the bandwidth; it was because of that he was able to do a dedicated project on the laser [...] I think that the real story is of a man who, through his persistence, was able to defy the authoritative voices of the time who were saying the laser was not possible.

Read “And let there be light”, an account of the race to make a laser in Physics World magazine: May 2010 special issue (written by yours truly).

* Maiman’s words.

Winston Churchill famously said that history is written by the victors. In the case of the laser it might be more accurate to say that history was written by those with the best public relations team.

This weekend, on 16 May to be precise, the laser celebrates its 50th anniversary. On this day in 1960, Theodore “Ted” Maiman, a junior employee at the Hughes Aircraft Company, observed the first evidence of laser action.

His device, which was built out of a photographic flash lamp coiled around a stubby crystal of artificial ruby, emitted short pulses of red light. The optical signal was faint – it had to be captured and amplified using a photomultiplier tube – but measurements proved that it was a laser nonetheless. Improving his design over the next few weeks, Maiman created a laser bright enough to burn through a Gillette razor blade.

The significance of the laser was obvious to Maiman’s employers, who wanted to publicize the achievement right away, and so convened a press conference in New York on 7 July 1960. Far from being described as “a solution in search of a problem”, the press release issued on that day contained a laundry list of possible applications for a laser.

I think it’s safe to say that the outcome of the press conference wasn’t quite what Hughes intended: sensationalist newspaper headlines screaming “LA Man Invents Scientific Death Ray”; loss of credibility because Maiman hadn’t been given a chance to publish his results in a scientific journal; confusion in the scientific community because the press photo that was circulated showed a later design for the laser using a much larger flash lamp and crystal than the original; and having gone public in advance of filing any patents, Hughes forfeited the international patent rights to Maiman’s laser design.

Once word was out, research laboratories across the US dispatched scientists to Malibu to try to find out what Maiman had actually done, while simultaneously redoubling their own efforts to make a laser. Many researchers tried – and some soon succeeded – in reproducing his work using the brief description from the press release and the publicity photographs. One of those research teams was at Bell Telephone Labs, now known as Bell Labs, which succeeded in making a pulsed ruby laser on 1 August 1960.

The Bell Labs public relations team persuaded the researchers to haul their apparatus 25 miles away to the top of a hill and then aim it back at an old, very tall radar tower behind at the company’s headquarters in Murray Hill. This provided a powerful demonstration of the laser’s potential for optical communications, which was perfect material for a press release. Time magazine said the device could be as important as the transistor; like many reports, they didn’t seem to realise that this wasn’t the first laser.

The positive reaction may have been influenced by the fact that the Bell Labs’ name was already strongly associated with lasers. Who in the physics community hasn’t heard of the December 1958 Physical Review paper describing the properties of “Infrared and optical masers” by Bell Labs’ researchers Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes? This paper, containing a proposal for making a laser using alkali gas, was the catalyst for the worldwide efforts to make a laser. Townes had already made a name for himself by inventing the maser, the precursor to the laser, which amplifies microwave radiation rather than visible light.

To be continued…

The “FTTH Benefit Compendium” is a new study commissioned by the FTTH Council Europe and carried out by research firms iDATE and Yankee Group, which set out to map the FTTH ecosystem and look at the benefits of FTTH from the different perspectives – including homeowners and building managers, local authorities and utilities, ISPs and over-the-top network service providers.

Despite being present at the FTTH Conference in Lisbon last week when the study was unveiled, I struggled to get the complete picture. Only 15 minutes was allocated to the presentation of this report – an unfortunate necessity in a conference with such a packed timetable.

To put this right I called Benoît Felten, senior analyst with Yankee Group, who presented the study in Lisbon, to ask him about the objectives, the approach, and the key conclusions. What follows is in his own words:

BF: The first objective of the study was to highlight the issues around the perception of benefits: who benefits, who could benefit, who perceives the benefits, who doesn’t? The idea is not to say FTTH is good, or that FTTH brings social or economic benefits – it’s a much more down to earth thing. We need to be able to say, as a telco this is what you can expect in terms of benefits; as a landlord this is what you can expect; as a consumer this is what you can expect; as a whatever… this is what you can expect. We tried to address all of the players in the ecosystem, with the conscious exception of the vendors.

The final output of the report is formed around two questions: who misperceives the benefits and needs to be corrected in order to align them with FTTH deployment, and which inhibitors are out there that need to be countered.

For example, right now in countries like France or Sweden or the Netherlands, we see that landlords are blocking the way. They are absolutely slowing things down because they don’t understand what’s in it for them. There’s a ton of horror stories here in France: there’s a telco in Marseille who was getting so frustrated they actually gave the landlord some cash to get access to the building. The next day they had 50 calls from 50 landlords to say well if you give me the same cash you can get into the building. Suddenly the cost of wiring the building has gone up by 20% because of this one move.

The irony is that landlords have absolutely clear interests in doing FTTH because the value of their property goes up. There are service environments emerging in Sweden around services for the landlord. The crux of the problem is how you address the landlord as a customer rather than as a barrier. If you are in combative relationship, it’s never going to be easy. But if you can say we’ve done this calculation and you could save 20% of your operating costs every year in managing the building because we’re bringing fibre in there, why would the guy refuse?

I only highlighted three of the key messages [in my presentation in Lisbon], but there are probably five of them, and then there’s a ton of smaller things which are worth looking into.

There is a parallel aspect of the study, which deals with services. We keep talking about all of these services that could come on fibre but we’re not really justifying why they require fibre for the most part. So the idea was to have an outlook on what these services could be, when they could emerge, what level of connectivity we think they will require and why.

The report analyses services using a three-point matrix for each service: download, upload and latency. We said, well may be this service doesn’t require a lot of download, but it requires low latency – that would be the case for cloud computing, for example – and actually the level of latency it requires would be hard to deliver without at least FTTC and probably FTTH. For each service – there were eight – we went through that kind of reasoning.

The second part of the service aspect of the study was to highlight some of the revenue streams that might arise from these services. A lot of people assume that any revenues would be for telcos and we wanted to break that perception because it’s not true. In fact, this is actually becoming a core question for telcos. It’s not about which revenues can be derived, it’s about which revenues will be theirs ultimately.

We also tried to distinguish between the revenue streams for some services. In video communication, for example, we have two distinct revenue streams. One says the telco is providing the service, the other says a Google-type company is providing the service.

Looking at it from the telco’s point of view – and I’ve talked to probably 20 of them in Europe about this – the question that comes back again and again is this: if I provide 100Mbps symmetric service, why would the customer use my in-house video if he can just get it over the internet for free? It seems to me if we can’t answer that question, then the frankly slow industry dynamics that we’ve seen over the last two years are going to continue.

The complete report on the FTTH Benefit Compendium is due to be presented to the FTTH Council Europe at its General Meeting in April.

This year’s event was held in Portugal’s premier conference centre, the Feira Internacional de Lisboa – the best conference centre in the world according to my taxi driver, who provided the scary moment of the trip by reversing onto a roundabout to get me there (he would no doubt blame my poor Portuguese pronunciation which I tried to supplement with pointing).

The conference itself was the polished production that you will have come to expect if you’ve ever been to an FTTH Council Europe event before: impeccable organisation, slick audio visuals on huge screens, and a cleverly organised layout that minimized walking and made it possible to forget that we were in an aircraft hanger of a venue. The food and Wi-Fi were also free of charge – these items are a sure-fire way to a journalist’s heart (not that I needed winning over).

I spent most of my time in the content and services stream. The conference theme “taking your life to new horizons” reflects the Council’s new emphasis on services and applications, and I wanted to get an insight into the content provider’s perspective. Here’s what I learned:

1. The number of fibre users throughout the world is reaching critical mass, and it’s about time that service providers realised what an opportunity they have to create new applications tailored to this market. There are 25 million fibre subscribers in the Asia Pacific region, nearly 7 million in North America, and 3.5 million in Europe including Russia. Google is one of the few companies to understand the potential of this almost untapped market, and will be using its experimental FTTH network to try to work out how to monetize this consumer group, says Yankee Group analyst Benoit Felten. This will create what he calls a “virtuous circle” – the emergence of new services will help stimulate demand, leading to more subscribers… I’m sure you get the idea.
2. The true rewards of broadband won’t be attained until coverage goes national, according to Taylor Reynolds, an analyst with the OECD. And he illustrated his point with a rather telling example from France. As part of its disaster recovery plan for an H1N1 pandemic, the French government had put together 620 hours of video covering nine subject areas that could be broadcast via TV channels over a period of 90 days. Reynolds was surprised to find out that the programming would not be made available over the internet – which is odd because the internet is the most sophisticated delivery mechanism available. With internet delivery, lessons could be distributed via the highly efficient peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol, and students could get instruction direct from their teacher using a video link. But this wasn’t being done because not all students have access to broadband. Reynolds went on to discuss a recent OECD study that had looked at how much cost saving from “spillover effects” would be needed to justify investment in a national broadband network. The amount required is not huge in the context of national spending – cost savings of just 1.0-1.5% would be needed in the sectors of health, education, electricity and transport. Governments should take these spillover effects into consideration in their budget and strategy because, by definition, these are benefits that the FTTH provider does not get paid for.
3. Healthcare is the world’s largest service industry, and it is looking towards ICT to help it solve massive challenges: an aging population, ongoing shortages of healthcare personnel, and an increase in the prevalence of chronic diseases. Before he was invited to the conference, Ton van den Hoven, senior director of healthcare informatics at Philips Healthcare, had never heard of the FTTH Council Europe or its work, and yet one of the key challenges for the adoption of e-health is infrastructure. (The other challenge is standardisation – so that exchange of patient records and healthcare data can take place regardless of the technical solution.) Philips Medical is very interested in getting good connectivity to patient homes for “compliance monitoring” – keeping an eye on the patient to make sure they are following the treatment regime. Apparently this is big reason that treatments fail. “Home healthcare needs to be integrated into the overall health care cycle,” said van den Hoven. At least now we can say the conversation between these two important industry verticals – telecoms and healthcare – has begun.
4. Digital broadcasters are struggling with bandwidth issues on legacy networks. Today they face a stark choice: offer more channels at low quality, or go for high quality transmission, but be limited in the number of channels they can offer. That kind of trade-off doesn’t make sense for a business that’s competing with cable TV and its hundreds of channels. IPTV providers at the show had the same message: the last mile is the bottleneck for delivery to the consumer, and we want you to help us. The transition from broadcast to on-demand models of content delivery is also causing a certain amount of pain. Remember all the brou-ha-ha with telecoms networks wanting the BBC to pay for iPlayer content delivery in the UK? The same problem will crop up in other countries. Right now RTL’s catch-up TV service in the Netherlands represents only 4% of viewing time; imagine how much bandwidth will be needed to bring that fraction up to 10 or even 20%.
5. As the above examples show, the FTTH ecosystem is really complex, and will involve new relationships and different business models. Benoit Felten (again!) presented the results of a study commissioned by the FTTH Council Europe on the so-called FTTH Benefit Compendium. One of the key results is a graphic showing the ecosystem as a kind of segmented onion. This takes the simple, four-layer model of the FTTH world – passive, active, services, end-user – to a whole new level. Benoit only had 15 minutes to explain the key points of his research, so I’m planning to interview him as soon as time allows so I can understand the bigger picture.
6. Overall, the FTTH world has made steady progress, but for an audience keen for revolution and disruptive innovation, that wasn’t enough. The number of fibre subscribers grew at about the same clip this year as it did last – about 20% – and as FTTH operators get up to speed on their marketing and messaging that growth should continue and even accelerate. Today just about every country in Europe has a digital strategy that recognises the importance of broadband to the national economy. FTTH equipment is getting faster and cheaper, operators and vendors are getting clever with deployment techniques, and services and applications are becoming an important part of the equation. But there is no silver bullet – at least not yet.
7. [off topic] It is warmer outdoors in Lisbon in February than it is in my house. The boiler repair man dropped by last week and applied a “Birmingham screwdriver” (gave boiler a thwack), but to no avail. Been a week without central heating now…

What did you learn in Lisbon? Share your experience using the message boards below.

Disclosure: I do project work and copywriting for the FTTH Council Europe, who paid me to be in Lisbon to report on the event.

Video sharing is a key service on social media websites, and high-bandwidth networks are essential for these services to function properly. Qualman noted that while consumers may not understand megabits, they do understand that their video isn’t loading fast enough. And they may well use social medial channels to complain about the quality of their broadband service.

Fear of negative feedback can make businesses wary about embracing social media, says Qualman, but the smart companies understand that negative feedback can be turned on its head and used to their advantage. If a company can resolve a problem in a public forum, it can boost its reputation, and possibly even convert the complainant into one of its biggest fans.

Social media is not something businesses can avoid, he adds. People are out there talking about your company whether you like it or not. Social media has caused an important shift in power on the internet; now a single consumer can have a huge impact on brand and reputation. To illustrate the point, Qualman showed the following YouTube video:

There’s no doubt that social media is a force to be reckoned with. (If you still have doubts, then view this video). But the implications run deeper than that. Qualman’s take-home message is that social media has become an essential resource for business, and he has plenty of hard data to back up this claim.

For instance, Dell claims to have sold $3 million of computers using Twitter. Barack Obama used a social media campaign to raise $500 million in donations via social media websites; 92% of those donations were in increments of less than $100.

Further, research by Wetpaint/Altimeter found businesses that are fully engaged in social media significantly surpass their peers in both revenues and profits. The study also found companies with the highest levels of social media activity grew on average by +18%, while those with the least amount of social activity saw sales decline by 6%. To put that in context, only 18% of traditional TV advertising generates a positive return on investment.

Return on investment is only one aspect of social media, however. Qualman see the proper use of social media as an extension of good business ethics. Put simply, it’s about listening to your customers and then responding.

Social media affects every area of business, including marketing and PR, recruitment and new product ideas, sales and after-sales service. It can even work as a crisis management tool – when the plane landed on the Hudson River, the first anyone heard of it was when a photo update got posted on Twitter. That’s why it has to be fully integrated within the corporate culture.

Qualman encourages all businesses to take the plunge. “When you get into the social media space you’re going to make mistakes,” he says. “Get out there, fail fast and move forward. You don’t accomplish anything by sitting on the sidelines and watching.”

This article is a slightly expanded version of one that I wrote for the FTTH Council Europe. Please visit the “hot news” page of the FTTH Conference website for more reporting from Lisbon.

NGA projects are springing up all over the UK, from high-rise apartment blocks in Wembley to Alston, the most sparsely populated parish in the country. The end result is likely to be a “patchwork quilt” of community networks – a term coined by Brian Condon, director of Community Broadband Networks (CBN), and illustrated in this neat image made by Adrian Wooster, CBN’s chief technology officer.

The “patchwork quilt” is the preferred model of three scenarios describing how NGA might evolve in the UK. The alternatives were “Da Wo” (Big Me), which describes a new world based on one dominant network owner, and “islands of connectivity” a fragmented world with sub-scale isolated networks. Important work is under way at the newly formed Independent Networks Co-operative Association (INCA), and through the COTS (Commercial, Technical and Operational Standards) initiative, which aim to make sure that the UK ends up with the patchwork quilt scenario rather than just “islands of connectivity”.

With the enthusiasm of one still relatively fresh to blogging and the world of HTML/CSS, I thought it would be really cool to turn this into a clickable image map, with each area on the map linking to information about the project. Finally, I’ve found a few spare moments to pull it together. You can see the results by clicking on the thumbnail image of the patchwork quilt.

This is a map of community projects in the main, and so does not include BT’s recent fibre deployments, not Virgin Media’s cable network which is capable of delivering broadband at 50 Mbps or more. I still don’t have information for all the projects, so if you see a good web source about any of the projects, please email me or leave a comment, and I’ll add it to the map.

The image is © Adrian Wooster. I am grateful to Adrian for allowing me to use it.

For a written overview of NGA projects in the UK, I recommend this report from the Communications Consumer Panel.

The results echo findings from a study carried out earlier this year by Ofcom in conjunction with technical partner Samknows, which showed that actual broadband speeds in the UK are also substantially below advertised speeds – and consumer expectations.

According to the report from Telecompaper, the average download speed achieved in the Netherlands is 8.98 Mbps, compared to an average speed offered by the ISPs of 14.9 Mbps. Previous Telecompaper studies found the average actual download speed was 4.95 Mbps in December 2008, and 2.8 Mbps in November 2006. But while speeds have been improving in leaps and bounds, the gap between the service being advertised and the consumer’s experience has been maintained.

The tests were carried out by iPing’s software installed on the consumers’ computers, which automatically checks the speed of broadband. More than 2 million tests on 20,000 users were generated over the three month period from July to September. Owing to the set-up, the speed test checks the actual speed perceived by the end-user, which may include other factors like the wireless connection from the router to the home computer, explains Ed Achterberg, senior research analyst with Telecompaper and author of the report.

Many households in the Netherlands have a broadband connection in the utility closet – a point where services like gas, electricity and telephone lines enter the property. From that point the signal is delivered over a wireless network, and can be affected by the position of the computer in the house, and even by the type of concrete from which the building is constructed, he says.

Alex Salter from Samknows commented:

“I would stress that the only way to accurately measure a broadband provider’s performance is by running tests 24×7 whilst there is no other traffic from the home network. Only then are you actually testing the ISP rather than an individual’s home network, which may be being used by someone else in the house.”

Faster on fibre

One of the interesting things about the Dutch broadband study is that it collects speed data about fibre-to-the-home connections for the first time. Fibre lines achieved the best average download speed in the study by quite a wide margin, 40 Mbps, followed by cable with 14.43 Mbps and DSL with 5.81 Mbps. Fibre and cable also achieved the highest average performance ratios, delivering respectively 62 percent and 65 percent of average offered speeds, while DSL averaged just 55 percent of advertised speeds.

But wait a minute, isn’t fibre supposed to deliver the maximum speed available on the line? In this case it doesn’t appear to, and that could be related to the fact that the tests are performed at the computer. “We know that some providers deliver the maximum speed that is included in the package, but that’s not always received on the PC or desktop,” says Achterberg.

In Achterberg’s opinion, service providers need to be aware that the service they deliver depends on elements in the complete chain, which are outside their control but that impact upon the perception of the performance. Therefore, poor in-home wiring, or a badly positioned router or modem could be the undoing of a fibre-to-the-home users experience.

If you’re Dutch, then you may be interested in the fact that, like the UK study, cable operators seem to come out on top – at least as far as download speeds are concerned (upload and latency were not measured). Ziggo is most likely to provide speeds close to those advertised in the low-end segments of 0-1.5 Mbps and 1.5-3 Mbps, as well as in the 6-12 Mbps segment, according to the study. Meanwhile, UPC was most likely to deliver at high speeds, coming first in the 12-24 Mbps, 24-48 Mbps and 48+ Mbps segments, and tying with Tele2 for the best performance in the 3-6 Mbps segment.

This story also appeared on www.samknows.com.

Gauthey is uniquely qualified to talk about public investment in broadband networks. Before joining the giant optical equipment vendor, she was a member of ARCEP, the French telecoms regulator, and prior to that was responsible for regional digital development strategy at government-owned bank Caisse des Dépôts.

Eight years ago France was seriously lagging behind in broadband adoption, she says. The EU regulation on local loop unbundling (LLU) had just come into force, requiring France Telecom to allow other operators access to the copper cables that run from the customers premises to its telephone exchanges, but this had failed to stimulate broadband competition. France is a very rural country, and expanding their networks into low-density areas of population simply wasn’t looking attractive to alternative operators.

Realizing that market forces alone would not provide the level of broadband adoption that it desired, the French government decided that the Caisse des Dépôts could provide loans at reduced rates to local authorities for broadband development. But these loans had strings attached — local authorities could invest in broadband infrastructure, but were not allowed to act as telecommunications operators.

Local authorities were getting impatient with the market; they wanted to step in and invest, but they weren’t allowed to. In 2003 they eventually they got their own way when the French Parliament passed a new law enabling local authorities to be wholesale operators, and even retail service providers if there were no other available broadband providers.

As a result, a little over €2 bn was invested in local authority projects, mainly in fibre backhaul — the networks that connect local telephone exchanges to the national backbone. About half the money came from the public sector, the remainder from private investment.

In each project the local authority partnered with the wholesale arm of a second-tier telecoms operator, setting up a délégation de service public — what we would call a public-private partnership. Critics of the scheme thought that it would result in small, scattered operators, but in fact there are only four or five operators of these local authority networks, according to Gauthey. SFR set up LD Collectivités, Free set up Axione, Axia set up Covage, and so on.

Impact assessment

At the end of 2008, ARCEP was asked to provide an assessment of the impact of the local authority projects. 86 projects had been initiated, mainly by départements, of which 53 are currently running, covering roughly two-thirds of France.

Gauthey believes that the local authority investments achieved what they set out to do — enabling more cost-effective broadband coverage in medium and low-density rural areas. The evidence is in ARCEP’s data, which shows that LLU surged when these new backhaul networks were built; about 37% of central offices have been unbundled through the use of local authority backhaul networks.

There was also a positive impact on the uptake of mobile broadband, says Gauthey. “France issued mobile broadband licenses while I was at the telecoms regulator, and the only places where this worked were where the local authority backhaul was available,” she contends.

Local authority backhaul has also had an economic benefit for local businesses because it fostered the creation of profitable retail service providers dedicated to smaller businesses and local enterprise. “We had a problem that small companies were not very much on the internet,” Gauthey commented. “Now these companies are the ambassadors for taking up of internet services by SMEs.”

The best part? Backhaul networks are a future-proof investment that will continue to provide value as France tackles an even greater challenge: how to use public money to accelerate the deployment of high-speed broadband and next-generation access (NGA).

Speaking of NGA, recent reports say the French government has decided to invest €2 bn in fibre-to-the-home projects. A formal announcement is expected in December

“Backhaul is the bane of our life. One, we can’t get it, and two, we can’t afford it,” said Kevin Wood, team leader for Cybermoor, a community network in Cumbria. Cybermoor currently has around 360 users on a wireless network sharing 5 Mbit/s of backhaul. “We’ve got a very clever bandwidth management package that keeps most users happy,” he added, “But we’ve decided that if we’re going to put new kit in, we can’t carry on like this.”

A three-year service provider contract to establish 10 Mbit/s of backhaul capacity would cost £295,000, according to Wood. Instead, Cybermoor has decided to install its own microwave backhaul link. This involves raising a new 25-metre-high mast, and putting in a relay station in order to reach the network of neighbouring County Council Northumberland. “It’s quite a lot of work,” he adds, proving himself to be master of understatement.

Even FTTH networks in the UK appear to have backhaul bottlenecks. West Whitlawburn is a housing co-operative that has installed fibre to a new-build social housing estate in Glasgow; it has just been given the go-ahead to extend its network to six existing high-rise blocks on the same site. The fibre network has around 100 subscribers, which probably makes it the largest FTTH network in the UK (BT’s FTTP pilot site at Ebbsfleet is believed to have around half that number of end-users). All 100 homes on the West Whitlawburn network are being serviced by a 20 Mbit/s bonded-line DSL connection, although an upgrade to 100 Mbit/s should be complete in the next few weeks.

Lack of backhaul capacity has other ramifications. “Until you get decent backhaul, you don’t have to worry about open access. Service providers aren’t going to want to offer their services on your network if they have to pay to get to it,” said Jez Willcox, senior network consultant for Allied Telesis, the firm supplying new Ethernet equipment for Cybermoor’s upgrade.

“We’re putting 100 Mbit/s into houses, we shouldn’t be in the position where we’re struggling with 10 Mbit/s of backhaul,” he concluded.

The discussion kicked off with one of the key questions facing potential community networks: what are the people in the community going to use the network for? The answers included the usual suspects: telephone, broadband and TV. Optional extras were a community-focused website, telehealth (monitoring heart patients remotely was given as an example), femtocells (a mini base station that picks up your mobile phone signal and pipes it over the broadband connection to boost reception at home), community video surveillance and smart metering.

The “killer app” in this myriad of possibilities is simply reliable broadband. (There’s a talk tomorrow about this, and the dangers of over-engineering the network with so-called value-added services.) The greatest demand for community networks comes from people who can’t get basic 2 Mbps broadband. However, the additional services can be an incentive for a public body such as a school or hospital to get involved, which creates a new source of income for the network, and a stronger social argument for obtaining funding.

The next piece in the puzzle is community engagement. A small but dedicated team will be needed to establish the viability of the project. The teams that have the greatest chance of success are those with a champion, someone who is absolutely passionate about the project, and has been there from the beginning. The rest of the team needs a variety of skills: accountant, lawyer, technical, marketing and communications, and market research.

Getting the support of the wider community is also key to success: not only does the business case depend heavily on getting end-users to sign up, landowners, local authorities and others need to be on-side when it comes time to roll out the infrastructure (more on that later).

Before that comes the planning stage. Good data on the copper access network is available from www.samknows.com, which can be combined with maps and other statistics to help build up a picture of the community’s requirements, says Adrian Wooster, technical director of CBN.

It’s important to understand the community, how many people there are, where they live, who they get their existing telecoms services from, and how much they’re prepared to pay; but asking the right questions can be tricky. “If you make it too easy for people to say yes, then when you need to get money out of them, [they’re not interested] and then the business model falls apart,” Wooster said.

Rutland Telecom, a small telecoms company that does sub-loop unbundling (installing its own equipment in a streetside cabinet), overcame this problem by asking customers for a deposit, which was held in escrow until the network became operational. “50 people [in Lyddington] gave us a deposit,” said Mark Melluish, co-founder of Rutland Telecom. “We made it pleasant, booked an evening in the village hall, provided canapés, and asked people to bring their chequebooks.”

Talk then turned to funding from a variety of possible sources, starting with the EU’s €1 billion for broadband, through national and local government, charities and the national lottery, banks and benevolent individuals, ending with the community itself, through a community shares program.

There were conflicting views on the subject of state aid. “It’s not a big deal to put public money in providing you have the right financial structure and the right network structure [open access],” said Steve Spillane, a director of CBN. But John Lloyd from Carmarthenshire County Council pointed to the FibreSpeed project to connect up businesses in Wales: 6 years, 11 months and 3 weeks were “spent arguing between lawyers and the Assembly in the EU”, and that’s why the project has progressed so slowly. It was planned in 2002; seven years later only four business parks have been connected. Others thought that now the precedents for public funding of fibre networks had been set, future state aid approvals would get processed much faster.

The final challenge in the pre-operational phase of the network is the actual network roll out. (Presumably somewhere along the line, a decision has to be made about what technology to deploy, but this fell outside the scope of the workshop.) Kevin Wood, team leader for Cybermoor, which is connecting a school into its network using fibre, described “how to dig holes and fill them in again” – in Cybermoor’s case they trained a local contractor, who was able to deliver the service much more cheaply than the national average. The technology for digging in the fibre or duct is well established, the problematic parts are planning the route, obtaining permissions and wayleaves, and dealing with unforeseen obstacles, says Wood.

I’d like to thank INCA for inviting me to NextGen09.