Lately I have been experimenting with Vidyo (www.vidyo.com), a videoconferencing tool designed for the professional SOHO/SMB/Roadwarrior market. And the tests showed why a 2 person video call is a gimmick, and 3 or more is a major difference.


vidyo-on-windows-7.jpg























The promise of videoconferencing is that you save a lot of time, money and carbon emissions. Or act as a fallback option, as  the recent volcano eruptions in Iceland have showed.
Nevertheless so far my practical experience has been with high-end systems (like the wonderful roomsized conference facilities of Cisco) or Skype with video.

The highend systems are impressive, but its like going to a jobinterview: not a casual thing, you make an appointment and dress up, prepare yourself.  Skype on the other hand is great for the sound quality of the wideband codec (if the connection is OK), but I fail to see the added value of  a moving picture of my face : as many others, I am disappointed by how I look when viewed through a webcam.

So, is there a market for something in the middle? Even when it lacks (as of now) chatting, recording voice and video? 

The first impressions were OK but nothing convincing. Ok, the image quality is quite good when you have a good camera and connection, the synchronisation between sound and image is better than Skype. Big deal? 

When we started to have multiperson conversations the difference became serious and obvious. And its not so much the product as the experience of seeing all the faces simultaneously while having a conversation. It makes a LOT of difference between having a conference call by phone or a multiperson videoconference. But why?

The difference acording to psychologists s that when you have a conversation between 2 persons, you always know who is talking and who is responding. A good voice quality is enough to sense the reactions and emotions of the other person.

This changes completely when there is a multiperson conversation. We as humans have an uncanny subliminal capability to read instantaneously the emotions in a group from the non-verbal communication as expressed by bodylanguage and facial expressions. So being able to see the reactions of people NOT speaking, and them being able to see your reactions adds a lot to the richness and depth of the conversation. And as I can tell from my experience, it does.

Vidyo has a good product, as far as I can see. It works on your laptop, is interoperable with highend systems like Polycom and Tandberg. Tandberg apears to have a similar product and others will follow most likely. Great, competition works.

The key take away from these tests is that videocalling is a gimmick which does not really add value. Videoconferencing with multiple persons however has a lot of value.

More is indeed more

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The term "High Definition"  for video content or TV-channels is used by marketeers for about anything that is better than the standard analog or digital transmissions (mainly on cable networks). It is claimed that compression technologies have evolved to a point where you only need "X" Mbps for a "High Definition" image. "X" is a number between 3 and 20 Mbps, depending on the source.

It is not easy to test these claims in normal life. Last week I had the opportunity for an impromptu test.

In the demonstration room of the new headoffice of Reggefiber one could see content on 3 identical large (40 inch+) LED TV screens. 
The Roland Garros semifinal (tennis) was on 3 channels on the screens next to each other. The first standard SD (digital), the second "HD" Nederland 1 (MPEG-4, 11 Mbps, transcoded by the channel), the third "HD" Eurosport (MPEG-2, 20 Mbps without transcoding).

The difference between the SD and both HD channels was obvious. But to my surprise the difference between the 11 Mbps and the 20 Mbps channels was also quite visible. The larger bitrate showed more detail, an easier viewing experience. I have never been so close to a large screen without becoming tired.
Calling shots in or out was easy, you could almost identify each piece of gravel.

Yes, more is indeed more.




Rural FttH

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Deploying FttH in vast countries like the USA and Australia poses its own challenges compared with dense urban countries like the Netherlands.  Often citied issues are the lower densities of housing cited as the main reason why a shared fiber architecture is unavoidable, and  very low density rural areas which are deemed unaffordable.

The recently published architecture of the Australian FttH network suggests otherwise. More detailed data of real geographic distribution in the US states of Vermont and Minnesota (courtesy Tim Nulty) supports these doubts.

In Australia and in the USA  the vast majority of the population is concentrated in urban areas.

In Australia 67 % of the population lives in the top 50 urban areas, if you include the major rural areas you can reach 85 % of the addresses in 1,5 % of the land.

australia centre.JPG






FCCdensity.GIF
























A different dataset as provided by the FCC (distance between addresses) shows the same pattern for the USA: 90 % of the population lives close to each other in separate geographical area's.

US census data of 2009 show that the top 350 "Metropolitan Statistical Areas" encompass almost 85 % of the population, quite similar to the Australian distribution.

Well, this data certainly does not point to any real problems with distances and length of fiber in FttH topologies, at least for the majority of the population.

But what about the other 15 %?

Tim Nulty has often pointed to the fact that homes in rural areas are also concentrated. Only a very few homes are really, really isolated. The concentration takes two forms.

First: a town centre, homes grouped together.

Secondly: homes strung along a road or a river bank.

As Tim says:

Vermont is the most "rural" state in the USA as measured by the % of the population that does NOT live in a "standard metropolitan statistical area".  SMSA's are defined by the Census Bureau and are 50,000 pop or over.  75% of Vermont's population of 620,000 does not live in any SMSA.    (Indeed, Vermont has only 1 SMSA--the metropolitan area of Burlington. There is one other "urban" area of 17,000 and two of 11,000.  Everything else is smaller).  This is the definition of "rural" used by the US Dept of Agricultures "Rural Development Administration".  

There are 240,000 households.  75% of that = 160,000.  There are approximately 12,500 miles of inhabited roads outside the SMSA.  That gives a household density of 12.8 per linear mile of inhabited road.  If one counts all premises (businesss, schools, institutions etc) this density would be close around 13.8.    

Apparently these numbers are typical of the rural areas of the entire eastern part of the USA--i.e. east of the Mississippi and .  Of course, in the larger, more urban states, a smaller % of the total population would live outside SMSA's those parts of Washington and Oregon States that are rural and lie west of the Coastal range.  But the non-SMSA areas, themselves, would have similar but slightly higher density characteristics to Vermont  (i.e. 14 - 17 HH/mi rather than 12 - 14).  A little over a 100 yards between homes......

The data strongly suggests that the cost of the FttH-local-loop in these semi-rural areas is not prohibitive at all.

The problem for any local initiative will be the backhaul from the local town centre to peering points. There will probably very little competition or only one supplier, giving them ample opportunity to squeeze the locals. Probably the best stimulus for local FttH in "rural" areas is a good affordable backhaul .

So yes, even in the USA it must be affordable to get over 90 % of the population on FttH and support the rest with wireless and satellite, like Australia.

 

The clever Australian FttH architecture

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As a proponent of evaluating FttH topologies (shared and point-to-point) on their path dependencies and option values I have been looking forward to see how the Australians would make their choices.

One of the factors that make their case interesting is the utility infrastructure approach. The Australian Government has decided that a country wide open FttH infrastructure is required and will be deployed.  Deploying FttH in vast countries like the USA and Australia poses its own challenges compared with dense urban countries like the Netherlands.  Often citied issues are the lower densities of housing so a shared fiber architecture must be unavoidable, and  very low density rural areas which are deemed unaffordable.

The recently published architecture of the Australian FttH network show an intelligent and interesting approach (courtesy Peter Ferris for explaining some details) . The first observation is that even in a vast country like Australia people live closely huddled on a small part of the land. 

Australia density.GIF










67 % Of the population lives in the top 50 urban areas, if you include the major rural areas you can reach 85 % of the addresses in 1,5 % of the land. So it makes sense to provide 93 % of the addresses with FttH and the remaining with radio (5%) and satellite (2%).

For the 93% which will get FttH they have chosen for a surprising combination of options in their architecture. The next-best-thing to full point-to-point in my opinion, full with potential to support different kinds of technologies and future upgrades if and when needed.  

Let me focus on the interesting choices: overprovisioning in a point-to-point topology in the deepest part of the last mile, underprovisioning in the concentrated parts of the outside plant.

The basic building block of their architecture is a group of up to 200 addresses. A fiber local loop is deployed with 3 (!) fibers per address. In an aerial deployment 12 local drop fibre connectors (preterminated drop line, no splice needed) are made available on the poles per 4 addresses and used when and how required. The same approach is used for underground cabling. This setup will allow for layer 1 unbundling future expansion, support of point-to-point Ethernet to businesses, multiple ISP's to same address, support for 3G/wifi mobile broadband and so on.

All fibers for these 200 addresses concentrate in a Fiber Distribution Hub (FDH), a cabinet in the street or cleverly combined with other uses like a seat in the parc. In the FDH the connections are made to either a splitter (for PON) or a single fiber (point-to-point) in ducts leading toward higher layers of the network.  It is even foreseen to change the splitters for filters if WDM becomes financially viable.

Up to 16 FDH's are concentrated into a Fiber Serving Area Module (FSAM, max 3200 addresses).  The capacity in the concentration cabling initially deployed is enough to support PON as a technology to each home, plus some extra for businesses and other uses.  Some sort of redundancy is built in by an interesting "dual-loop" structure by geographical separate paths in the connection of FDH's to FSAM location. If needed the capacity to one or more FDH's can be increased by deploying more cables in that path.

fdh.GIF


 

The FSAM is a planning construct initially but it allows also for future expansion. The number of addresses is ideally suited to be served by a prefab active equipment cabinet (know as Controlled Environment Vaults, or APOP's in the Netherlands), if needed. 


CEV.jpg

















(Controlled Environment Vault)

These CEV's bear a lot of resemblance to the prefab APOP's Reggefiber deploys outside city centres. They can be truckrolled to a given location, placed within a day.

AAPOP.jpg









(Reggefiber prefab APOP)


At the start FSAM's are just a passive concentration point for cabling to the Fibre Acces Node (FAN).  Again some redundancy is introduced by geographical different routes for the cabling to the FAN exchange / central office, maximum size 76,800 locations/adresses.

It makes a lot of sense for the geography with lots of suburbanity. The key is having space in the street for these FDH cabinets. Just install a lot of point-to-point fiber in the part where a lot of labor is required (you don't want to redo that ever) and allow for all kinds of upgrades , options for expansion, unbundling locations, active equipment deeper into the network, as you see fit in the future.

Smart guys, down under.

Broadband as a utility for all technologies?

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In this and this previous post I have elaborated on the concept of virtualization of the access line and the use of "pluggable" subscriber/service modules.

The question was raised if this would only work with fiber and more specifically point-to-point fiber with active Ethernet.

The answer is that this concept will work with (V)DSL, DOCSIS, GPON or active Ethernet, for starters. But there are differences which are determined by the complexity of the technology and the inherent limitations of the access network

The NeTU will be specific for the technology, that is a given. 
Active Ethernet is so simple and robust that the NeTU will be very cheap for very high bandwidths. GPON is more complicated, requiring more expensive hardware (but not more expensive than current OLT's). VDSL has limited bandwidth.

DOCSIS is well known but limited in garantueed bandwidths because the capacity is inherently shared in the analog cable part with many subscribers. So it is quite difficult to create specific virtual access lines that are NOT shared up until the specific backhaul for the service is reached.

But the principle will work in practice with all technologies, just much better and easier with FttH. 


Numb3rs

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PR people know that many journalists do not read and study press releases carefully.
So when Alcatel-Lucent announced a breakthrough to 300 Mbps over copper it was the headline of the day in many blogs, including the renowned Om Malik.

Alas, the details...

Yes, the Bell labs guys are technological wizards. Amazing technological tricks.
Yet:
- the 300 Mbps is the maximum bandwidth available for the sum of upload and download, so symmetrical its 150/150 Mbps.
- reached by bonding of two pairs of copper, means 75/75 Mbps per pair, which is some 50 % better than the previous incarnation
- lab tests always are far better than real life, 
- the lack of predictability is the main problem with DSL, the actual performance is very sensitive to the widely varying condition of the outside plant and might be much, much less than the maximum.

So don't hold your breath. When steamships were introduced the maximum speeds reached by sailing ships quickly surged. To no avail, because the price of more speed was thoroughbred nervous behaviour of the sailing ships, making them extremely difficult to run.


Broadband as a utility (2)

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In the previous post I have introduced the concept of a NeTU , P-apps and VLAN's to improve the use of Broadband as a Utility.

The slide shows the concept of the architecture.
P-app2.jpg

I guess not everybody knows that this virtualization of the access line is common practice. In a triple play package (Internet, VoIP, IP-TV) all services are run over separate "channels", virtual access lines created within the boundaries of the maximum access bandwidth.
(Some operators run VoIP over the top, however, but that's beside the point).

The technology and the implementation may differ: in a DOCSIS cable network it is implemented  in its particular incarnation, not being a VLAN, but the principle is the same.

The proposed concept just takes it one step further: why not allow more virtualization within the abundance of the access line and combine it with a NeTU and P-apps that make life easy for the consumer and allow for separate billing? 

You could even imagine virtualization of voice, Internet access and IP-TV in separate P-apps.
Gives you the freedom to select packages or combine individual selections, have multiple subscriptions (TV) in parallel.

A marketeers dream...




Gigabit Society: Broadband as a utility

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( This lenghty post is more or less the presentation I was planning to give at Fiberfete before the ashcloud ruined my intinerary. Instead of sheets I have created an essay on the subject. Please read on after the break, the good stuff is over there).



In my view 2010 will be designated as the year where we  passed from Megabit per second (Mbps) into the Gigabit per second (Gbps) society.  In every major market Gbps access for consumers is tested or delivered to the public. The prices are dropping fast because the hardware for FttH networks has made major jumps in price-performance.  For Ethernet ports a 1 Gbps port and a 100 Mbps port nowadays have the same cost.

 

For some people a Gigabit is unimaginable: what on earth could you possibly want to do with this abundance?

Their problem is that scarcity blocks your imagination, like a nomad in the desert searching for water. For someone living in the desert water is life. You nourish your camel or horse and hope your water supply will last until the next oasis. No other use of water comes to mind, of course not. 

 

For someone living near the Niagara Falls all kinds of new applications of water suddenly become possible:
- energy generation

- cooling

- entertainment (waterskiing, scuba diving, boating, sailing, swimming, waterglides,
fountains, rowing, beach life, surfing etc.)
- irrigation
- transport of goods

Abundance nourishes imagination. Like the dry seed waiting for water, imagination is the seed lying dormant within all of us, waiting for the opportunity to bloom. 

 

It is the same with broadband as with water.

 

Fortunately more and more people see the potential of abundance in communication to create an improved society, the Gigabit Society.

 

Sandcastles

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3D printing is getting professional nowadays. One innovative twist is to use sand and spray glue to create sculptures. See the video's, amazing.

Wish I was there

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The Fiberfete conference has started, alas without me. Where Swedes and Frenchmen could fly out (with some difficulty) the Dutch and UK delegations have been grounded. So we are glued to our Twitter feeds (#fiberfete and #Ecomm in parallel), following the live webcast and wishing we were there..... 

The opening talks have been interesting. Apparently the tactics of the opposing parties are the same everywhere: create Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt by telling halftruths or outright lies, throw money at PR.
The lowcost response by local "truth squads" to counter each and every false claim immediately and publicly by telling the facts is a very smart move. Credibility is a powerful coin, community responses are more trusted than corporate communications.

The announcement of the day was the Open Source Gigabeer from Portland. Hurray, Gigabeer for Gigabit societies!

Today will be even more interesting, so I encourage you to follow the webcast.
And for my presentation? I will place it online in some form (to be continued).
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