Aussies and Kiwis sampling Dutch broadband (6)

The program of the Australian and New Zealand trade mission was not completely filled with technical lectures. Mr Jos Huijgen, a former consultant to the Dutch telecom watchdog OPTA and an assistant director of the Department of Economic Affairs had some lessons for the audience:
- Control game of the government is over;
- Promote competition;
- do not focus on infrastructure;
- move away from access now to services;
- invest in public services;
- use local initiatives for scaling of services;
- promote bottom-up initiatives.

Mr Huijgen made it clear that in broadband the time had passed that the government was in control. Competition in broadband has worked. But he did not mince any words in making clear that the services part was weak. The public sector services are too scattered and there is a lack of pilots.

Public private cooperation is key in the services area. The Dutch government stresses four policy areas: mobility, healthcare, safety and education. There are four assigned areas for public private projects. On the local and regional level people involved in initiatives and projects are stimulated to talk to each other. By linking the dots the government looks for best practices. Industry and government have formed an association Netherlands Broadband Country and is bringing parties together in theme areas such as digital life, health, leisure, mobility and nomadic labour, retail and education. Research and development institutes are linked to each other so that they can use broadband more effectively for research and development. In the public sector an action program has been started up between the social sector and ICT.

All these policies take the line that initiatives should come from the bottom-up. You have to start with the end-user. Essential is to use local initiatives for the scaling of services. Too often initiatives have failed as they were stimulated by government and eventually became a bureaucratic organisation hardly yielding any results. (To me, such a project was the heavily subsidised project Kenniswijk, Knowledge Neighbourhood, in Eindhoven, where 84.000 broadband connections were promised and not realised, but which was eventually superseded by a less ambitious and successful broadband project in the neigbouring village of Nuenen).

So the lessons learned are that demand and supply should be linked, bottom-up initiative should be promoted and that scaling up of successful initiatives should be supported.

Blog Posting Number: 697

Tags: broadband, broadband policy

Aussies and Kiwis sampling Dutch broadband (5)

Especially the civil servant in the Aussies and Kiwis trade delegation were eager to hear about the involvement of the government in the pushing of Fibre to the Home (FttH) networks. The first that they arrived they already upset the program set up by Paul Budde and Fred Kappeteijn. While in Amsterdam they wanted to know everything about CityNet and how do you get it off the ground. Also on Tuesday it remained a subject of interest. And when they were in Almere they still were eager to learn how to set up an FttH network and keep it an Open Net.

Of course Amsterdam is the most interesting case as the city has invested 6 million euro and is now under scrutiny of the European Commission. The municipality of Almere has not put any money in it the FttH network, which will be laid from 2007 till 2010. Also the municipality of Nuenen did not put money in the network.

(c) Elaine Sullivan

The Netherlands is not the only country working on FttH networks. IN Japan 300.000 FttH connections per month will be realised by 2008. In Europe the battle for Paris is on. The Iliad network will go after 1 million homes at 1 billion euro. Neuf Cegetel wants to have 250.000 FttH connections at 50Mbps for 29,90! The incumbent France Telecom starts FttH connections at 100/10 Mbps for 44,90 in Paris, Poitiers, Marseille, Lille, Toulouse and Lyon. Noos Numericable puts in a massive investment. In the department Haute-de-Seine 1,5 million household connections are aimed at as well as 100.000 SME connections at 50 to 70 million euro. All in all no less than 100 broadband projects are under way in France. In Cologne in Germany a broadband project is going on as well as in Schwerte, Norderstadt, Hamburg and Gelsenkirche. But there are also projects in Vienna (Austria) and Zurich (Switzerland), while in Denmark an FttH network project has been taken up by an energy company, which will connect 35 percent of the homes and reach 50 percent of all Danish people. In the UK there is a project in Oxfordshire. In the rest of the UK the slogan is: 12/1 Mbps is enough for all and ever. Of course FastWeb in Milan is the most operational project in Europe.

Essential to the Open Net is the three layer model. There is a point to point connection for an unbundled local loop; this provides the largest capacity for future growth. The active layer has active Ethernet. On top of that is the application service layer. Any service provider can use the application service layer against the same conditions.

In Amsterdam the municipality is represented in the board of network. And Amsterdam has invested 6 million euro. Amsterdam claims that it did so under company conditions. In Almere the municipality is also represented in the board, but it will not invest in the network. In fact the municipality does not have to do this as an investor has been found and an operator, most likely KPN, will take care of the operations.

In all cases people ask, why an open network is the option. The answer comes from economics. A closed network will give a return upon investment of 8 percent, while an open network will yield 10 percent return upon investment.

Blog Posting Number: 696

Tags; Open network, FttH