Structural Separation – Where next for access?
The creation of Openreach, a separate division of BT, in the UK has accelerated the process of local loop unbundling and accelerated the growth in internet service delivery in the UK and the Openreach business has also proven to be a successful commercial entity in it’s own right.
Across the globe there is growing pressure to open up access to the existing copper local loop in order to facilitate a more rapid deployment of high speed internet services. Whilst the exact model of structural separation which will be choosen will depend on local circumstances, there is little doubt that the experience gained in deploying and operating the UK Openreach model will be of significant benefit to other countries, as they will be able to draw on the expertise gained in developing the process, system, technology and commercial solutions developed for the UK.
As structural separation and the full exploitation of the existing local loop gathers pace, at least two new technologies are in the process of being deployed in the local loop which will further accelerate change in the high speed internet services market, namely Wimax and Fibre.
There are two different, but related, deployment scenarios for Wimax. One of the most exciting is in developing countries with very low penetration of classical local loop infrastructures, where the use of Wimax can be used to extend high speed access rapidly to large parts of the population, thereby putting in place one of the essential elements of infrastructure to help economic and social development. The other is in developed economies, where Wimax is being used as a complementary technology in the local loop, for exampleas a complement to normal 3G mobile services, to provide very high speed and flexible LAN connectivity in concentrated commercial locations and to enable the very rapid deployment of very high capacity and high speed connectivity for temporary events (in developed countries texamples would include trade fairs and major sporting events, but this approach could also be used to provide much needed communication support quickly to relief organisations anywhere on the globe).
Fibre to the Home has for some time been the dream of visionaries in the communications business, but until now neither the technologies, applications nor the devices have been available which would justify the services necessary to make mass deployment a viable proposition. But the success of high speed DSL in creating business growth and attracting millions of online users creating vibrant online social communities, together with the arrival of HD TV (with content which actually makes use of the HD capability), increasingly sophisticated interactive gaming applications, a growing demand for high quality video-conferencing and the increasing number of professional knowledge workers who work from home using sophisticated tools, has started to make the deployment of fibre to the home a realistic proposition. It is true that there are still many in the industry who believe that this deployment will proceed relatively slowly. I, for one, do not agree with them. IN less than 5 years a significant proportion of homes in urban areas will be equipped with high speed LAN technology with direct access to fibre connection, driven in the first instance by the rapid growth in ‘on demand’ services on HD TV devices. Indeed failure to anticipate this growth will place communities at an economic disadvantage.
Wimax and Fibre will co-exist, in the same way as the current generation of mobile and fixed telephony devices co-exist, though in the years ahead, the service experience will be increasingly integrated , with seamless cross over from one to the other.
This explosion in very high speed access will present many deployment problems. One interesting one is how in cities to LAN enable apprtment blocks and yet allow different appartments to use different access providers. Failure to encourage this very local competition will undoubtedly stiffle growth, allowing the market to totally ‘free play’ will result in multiple fibre connections to any given appartment block, which will inevitably lead to gross economic inefficencies and a resultant slowdown in deployment. There is likely therefore (in some countries this is already under discussion) to be a need to unbundle in some sense the last 200 metres (i.e. the network into any given shared building) to ecourage rapid growth of the infrastucture. Whilst exactly how this will pan out is still unclear (the current unbundling legislation was driven by the need to open up the legacy of old state monopolies), it is evident that again the lessons learny from the current work of local loop unbundling and structural separation will be invaluable in helping accelerate the development and deployment of process and system solutions.
It is amazing to think that just 30 years ago the best we had for access from the home was an acoustic coupler (those of us who used it will remember how heavy they were to carry about) giving at bexst 110 baud connection speeds. We are now fast moving into a world, where portable PCs (from 2009) will come Bluetooth, Wifi, Wimax ready and with the technical and application capability to exploit the very high speed connectivity that Fibre will deliver. Also, over the next 10 years, we can look forward to the next 2 billion plus people, largely from developing countries, having direct access to the high speed internet, as technologies like fibre core and wimax local loop are rapidly deployed, thereby enabling economic growth, education and health applications, and taking us a very large step closer to the vision of a highly interactive global village.
About the author: Dr Sinclair Stockman is the Chief Industry Analyst for the Telecommunications Division of Singularity, a leading BPM vendor. (www.singularity.co.uk)
Tags: Local-Loop, OpenReach, Structural-Separation, Telco, Telecom, Telecommunication, WLR3