I have seen the future
27 September 2009
This week I went to Bournemouth to view a show house which demonstrates the capability of one of the largest FTTH schemes outside the national roll-out schemes of BT and Virgin Media. The scheme is branded Fibrecity and it is being constructed by H2O Networks which is a British, privately-owned company. The name of the company is the clue to its business model: it lays optical fibre in the sewers - in Bournemouth's case, those of Wessex Water - and then the cable comes out of a manhole and micro-trenches (20mm wide by 60-150 mm) take the cable to residential homes.
In Bournemouth, H2O started pulling in cable in the summer and by early 2011 expects to have passed 85,000 homes. So far, some 200 homes have been passed, of which 84% have agreed to the free installation of an A5-sized box being fitted to the outside of the house. H2O's business model means that it sees itself as a utility and expects to achieved a return on its investment over 15-20 years.
H2O will not itself provide any services. Instead it will run an open access network and, on appropriate commercial terms, any service provider than wishes to do so can use the network to serve customers. Any customer signing up to a service provider - none are operating yet - will visit the customer's premises to install the internal wiring that will be necessary to receive the service.
What services in what bundles at what prices are offered to consumers depends, of course, on the service providers, but the wholesale offering by H2O to those providers is 100 Mbit/s downstream and upstream. In the show house, I saw several televisions showing HD channels plus a Wii being used as an online console plus an X-box operating online plus IPTV on a PC plus several radio station plus an IP phone all operating simultaneously and the network coped smoothly with it all. Of course, no home will want or need this sort of bandwidth for years, but the network has a considerable degree of future-proofing and it will be for the competing service providers to parcel out the bandwidth as consumers find the need and are prepared to pay for it.
Bournemouth will be the first of a number of such Fibrecities. The next in line is Dundee. Construction there has not yet started but is expected to be completed in late 2011. Some 73,000 premises will be passed. Other Fibrecities are expected to be announced by H2O soon. The company's aim is to have half a million homes connected to its local networks by 2012.