This week I had the pleasure to be a speaker at the Fiber Week in Croatia, an event held for the 9th consecutive time. The beautiful surroundings and the good food were completed by interesting conversations.
One eye-opener was the extensive use of fiber optics in schips and yachts, not only for networking but also for sensing. Continuous measuring of the stress on hulls, sensing of weight and weight distribution, sensing of fluid levels, optical gyroscopes, you name it.
But the main topic was the extensive level of fiber-to-the-home initiatives outside of the EU including the Middle East.
Such as in Iran, starting with the enormous city of Teheran with 17 mio inhabitants. The plans are being made now, and they have the money. The government in Iran very well understands the importance of upgrading their (old) telecommunications infrastructure for their economy.
Ofcourse they want invest in the newest technology but shifting everything to IP has another advantage for them: controlling and eavesdropping communications is easier. The Saudi's have the same ambition only Fiber-to-the-Mansion creates its own challenges:
how many fibers do you lay to a gigantic mansion? Redundant or not? How about the internal wiring, should that also be fiber?
Everybody agreed that we will be surprised when these deployments start. As Telco 2.0 already has noted: topdown technocratic/autocratic deployment of fiber is a proven succesful model. Look at Japan, Singapore, [update] Korea and recently Australia.
It shortcircuits the haggling and lobbying of incumbents to maintain their monopolies, while they keep on delaying the investements as long as possible. As can be seen in Croatia (and other countries in the region) where DT has bought the incumbents. Tourism is a very important source of income for Croatia: close to 5 mio tourists per year visit the beautiful coastline. Many regions, municipalities and hotels have noticed that their visitors expect excellent connectivity, that it is a prime (dis-)satisfier.
To get an affordable high speed Internet connection they had to resort to alternative operators and deploying their own fiber. A big legal row started: DT claimed that had bought the conduits as well as the cables, therefore nobody else could use these conduits, blocking alternative operators. Municipalities and others protested as they had financed the civil works for the conduits.
According to Dr Tacic (former member of parliament) DT could not show any legal proof of their position but every deployment by altnets had to face legal battles. Suddenly a proposal for a new law appeared: the biggest user of a conduit was to be made responsible for the maintenance of the conduit with the side effect of controlling access to the conduit. How convenient.
The transit at the Croatian IX was supplied by the incumbent (DT) at artificially high prices. As last one enterpreneur managed to create an alternative route via Bosnia, Slovenia and Austria. The transit prices dropped to a fifth or less. Hurray for competition!
As a result of the recent regional wars there was a lot of fiber (main trunk networks) deployed for the military (secure, no interference). All utilities also have create a fiber based network
for themselves. The Croatian power utility is deploying gaspipes to every home, digging everywhere. So all that is needed is political will: will to use part of the conduits and slack capacity to create a good countrywide backhaul network, will to put conduits in the same trench as the gas pipes and allow all operators to use them.
This political will might appear quicker than expected: politicians complain that Croatians are now forced to send their money to Germany, instead of investing it in their own country in good infrastructure which will (to start with) improve their facilities for tourism and services business. A powerful argument in unsecure times.
