Amsterdam FTTH Visionary Speaks At and After Freedom 2 Connect

Yesterday at the Freedom 2 Connect conference I attended a panel on Open Fiber jam packed with top-notch speakers covering the deployment of fiber in Amsterdam, Japan, Vermont, and Lafayette, LA.

Let’s dive in and start with Dirk van der Woude, who manages the municipal FTTH project in Amsterdam, giving a flyby of some of the highlights I took away from his fantastic presentation:

- To set some of the context, apparently most of the big network operators in the Netherlands are owned by foreign interests, in particular American, British, and German. Dirk suggested that historically when you’re colonized, as he arges Dutch telecom has been, it’s not the local interests that end up counting, instead it’s all about making a profit to send back home. This has resulted in incumbents with little to no interest in investing for the good of the public to upgrade their infrastructure, which is what led to this municipal initiative.

- Here’s an interesting thought I’ll paraphrase into a quote: “You have to invest in infrastructure if you want to stay ahead in your economic and social development...Rather like osteoporosis, the underinvestment in infrastructure will slowly leech away your strength.”

- I hadn’t thought about this, but one point Dirk made is that when investment firms buy telecommunications companies it often robs them of their ability to invest in infrastructure since the new owners just spent all that money to buy the company in the first place. I don’t follow acquisitions/mergers all that closely, but I do think that if I were looking to buy a network operator it’d have to be someone who’s already deployed FTTH as then I don’t have to worry about upgrading my wires, only the electronics at either end. Plus I believe that whoever gets FTTH in the ground first holds the opportunity to establish a natural monopoly, making them the best bet for a prosperous long-term future.

- This was the first time I heard the term “fraudband,” which is defined as broadband technologies that over promise but will ultimately under deliver. The specific technology Dirk called out as fraudband was DOCSIS 3.0, which promises a racetrack with 120Mbps upload capacity but then fails to admit the limitations of its shared network where that 120Mbps may be spread across hundreds of homes.

- Love this quote, even with its double negative: “We believe that a city with a great future is a not a city without FTTH.” I might instead say, “A city with FTTH has a great future” or “A city that wants a great future needs FTTH” or “A city of the future has (or must have) FTTH.”

- Dirk took the time to distinguish between the different models being used to deploy FTTH across the Netherlands. He had a chart showing how different configurations of muni and private interests were being used to handle the deployment and management of the three layers of an access network--passive, active, and services--in cities across the Netherlands. Some are all muni, some are all private, but most were a mix of both, though in most all municipalities handled the passive layer. Why? Because it requires the highest capital expenditures and its ROI should be considered over the long term. He went on to show another chart highlighting the financial characteristics of all three layers. Rather than writing it all out I’ll see if I can find the slide to add as an image to a later post.

- He also made the very important point that having a cheap full fiber network in place allows for the easier deployment of better wireless than is possible without that network. Now instead of wireless routers having to create a mesh so they can share limited Internet access points, you can have each router be a node connected via fiber to the network, allowing you to use the full capacity of Wi-Fi or other wireless technology.

In talking with Dirk over drinks at the reception that evening I found him to be a profoundly deep, practical, insightful, and historically cognizant individual. He sees where things are going and he knows where they’ve come from.

In particular at one point he suggested we needed “Eisenhower broadband.” The term grew out of a conversation we and others were having exploring how broadband, and particularly fiber, is like roads in that we need there to be a national plan akin to the interstate highway system, where some national entity insures the major highways (backbone networks) crisscross the nation in an orderly and ubiquitous manner and then put it upon local communities to figure out their own local street system and how to connect to those highways.

More than anything what I appreciated about Dirk’s insight was the sense I get from everyone I talk or listen to who’s had success getting fiber deployed: they just said this is the goal, now let’s go do it.

That’s the best lesson we can learn in this country from the successes being learned both here and abroad. To get where we want to go all it takes is to set a goal to be great and start working towards achieving that goal.

It doesn’t matter how big the challenge is, we can overcome it if we work together and aspire to become a greater nation through the deployment and use of broadband.

Next up, some insight into the Japanese broadband miracle.