I attended yesterday an inspiring talk given by Lars Hedberg, Secretary General of the Swedish Urban Network Association (SSNf - Svenska StadsNätsföreningen): a non-profit organization, founded in 1998 and headquartered in Eskiltuna, a small city about 100km west of Stockholm. The association was founded by companies involved in fiber optics installation in urban areas as well as metropolitan networks in the greater Stockholm. Today, it is composed of more than 300 members - companies, organization (KTH is a member along with other Swedish universities), more than 150 metropolitan networks represented connected and lots of infrastructure providers (such as Ericsson, Alcatel and Cisco).
The goal is to create a whole new digital infrastructure all over Sweden, based on the principle that healthy competition is necessary and promotes growth through ICT development: it is shifting the paradigm from the traditionally state-owned or former state-owned "last mile" (i.e. the final run of cable that connects the end-user to the first active gateway). France Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, British Telecom are good example of painful and slow transition to unbundle the local loop. Sweden, with the former state monopoly of TeliaSonera, has somewhat better managed to open itself up to the competition. However, with 4.5 million households ultimately freed to choose their providers, it becomes critical to create a new technical and business model and framework, not necessarily controlled by the state, but monitored and regulated by the state.
Of course, Sweden itself brings specific challenges to this vision, most notably the geographical consideration (In northern Sweden, there are fewer people living there than in the entire Sahara desert!). To counterbalance the economic considerations with such a scattered country, the 290 municipalities in Sweden have to cooperate and bring in common their expertise and existing municipal network (as they represent a lot of spare capacity that can be offered to companies, residents and public agencies). As a result, the mission of SSNf is to encourage it through the following actions:
- Give the city and society an open infrastructure, controlled by the city and open for everyone (same terms and price).
- Stimulate the market to use the infrastructure, to share it, instead of having each player re-building everything again from the ground up.
- Make possible a fair pay-back of the invested money (self cost).
- Reduce digging in the street (e.g. in Stockholm there are 70 operators: just imagine if everyone of them was allowed to dig... ).
- Document and rationalize the process: SSNf works closely with with documentation projects and organization, to leverage and standardize on common standards and best practices.
And it actually seems that Sweden has the power to concretize this ambitious vision. Stockholm, through Stokab has one of the largest dark fiber network in the world. It is also quickly becoming a major Internet eXchange point (IX), especially towards the Nordic and Baltic countries (cf. the BalticOpen.net project with a fully functional fiber connection between Sweden and Latvia), Eastern Europe, and even Asia (projected connection of China to the western backbone through Russia, Riga and then Stockholm).
Lars then presented the actual topology for deploying this Open network in Stockholm, as an interlaced double ring:
- A red ring, as the network running in the community of Stockholm (180 schools, libraries, offices, City Hall...). This network powers 46000 employers and 80000+ students.
- A blue ring, as the network for healthcare (30 hospitals and healthcare centers amounting to 26000 patients/week).
These two rings are connected to one logical point, which holds the firewalls, communication equipment, and service distribution, meaning that service providers offer services to 100000+ users from a single point, making it quite simple to distribute the services.
The vision is that such model can be successfully deployed all over Sweden, even at a smaller scale: SSNf helps its members connect their respective city networks ‘islets” to each other and collaborate, cooperate to be more effective overall. In 5 years (+/- 2 years), the objective is to have a nation-wide mesh of local and regional nodes, throughout Sweden.
This will in turn empower the next step - the Broadband connected Household (as we can already witness to some extent in Japan): nation-wide Fiber To The Home (FTTH) makes it possible for advanced Triple Play services: High-Definition TV (HDTV) needs at least 20Mbit/s per channel, rich-service (gaming, telemedicine, e-learning) are also bandwidth-guzzling. Of course it means heavy upfront investment, but on a longer term it could save 300000 SEK (~33000€) / person / year!
Great outlooks indeed, and as the price of fiber and related equipment continues to drop, it will soon reach a comparable price to using copper or DSL for the last mile, with the added advantage of offering more than ten times the bandwidth. The real challenge is to craft the proper business models so that broadcasters come in and take advantage of this virtually unlimited digital distribution channel, without having tens of incompatible equipment to buy or competing standards for running services. The nation-wide switch to digital TV in 2008 is therefore a tremendous opportunity for a massive adoption of the faster, bigger and better digital world.
That's the title of an interesting article I found on Thursday's edition of The Wall Street Journal Europe. It highlights the increasing issue of music metadata, i.e. information on digital music files, like track name and number, artist(s), album title, genre and so forth. Back in the now old days of physical medium like LPs and CDs, one didn't have to look very far to find those information printed on the disc cover.
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