COMMUNICA | Issue Four
Just as not all municipalities are well-suited to operate electric utilities or water utilities, not all local authorities need to offer data services. However, all local authorities build and maintain roads, and fibre networks are the roads of our future. Local authorities can confine their roles to simply owning and maintaining the outside‘ Dark Fibre’ infrastructure, these being the inert components of the network that comprise the fibre itself, the boxes and enclosures used to make connections and house equipment, and the conduit through which the fibre travels. This is a familiar model in Sweden seen as the‘ pole star’ of digital societies where for many years connectivity has been at the centre of policy. While the UK still deploys 30 mbps Sweden have a policy of 98 % of citizens having a min 1000mbps or 1Gig speed up and down both at home and work by 2025. They will achieve this with a collaboration of a market-driven expansion in harmony with the public sector involvement. It is here that Open Access enables the ideal competitive platform for operators to sell products and services on equal terms irrespective of who owns the underlying fibre. In the early years of telecommunications networks, the infrastructure consisted of copper wires that carried one channel of data( an analogue sound signal). Configuring a connection between any two
points on a network required actuating mechanical switches to create a temporary physical circuit. At first, that mechanical switch was a human operator who physically pulled plugs and replaced them to create the circuit; eventually, that function was automated. To ensure maximum control of the customer service relationship, a service provider had to own and control every last bit of infrastructure down to the telephone at the end of the circuit. In early years this was the local authority who owned and managed all this who later became the telecoms players we know today. As automation gradually replaced each and IP technologies gradually transformed networks, the need for control of the infrastructure to provide services gradually disappeared. Finally we are at a significant milestone where we no longer require the legacy copper wires of the past and that fibre is delivered direct to the home / premesis( Fibre To The Home) or business( Fibre To The Business). In the 21st Century a service provider can be entirely virtual, riding on someone else’ s network and using someone else’ s fibre, yet still provide a high level of customer service. For 21st Century networks, this enables a further partitioning of network services into two levels, both entirely operated by the private sector: 1. Utility bandwidth services provided by a network operator.
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