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Communities: build your own broadband says entrepreneur

The time has come for communities who are "cut off from the digital divide" to opt out of BT and the cable companies, and install 100 megabit broadband over fibre to all premises. It can be done, promises Bernard Daines, founder of World Wide Packets.

It's a waste of time waiting for ADSL, Daines told the Mobile Campaign at a NetEvents conference in Montreux, Switzerland, today (Saturday). "Not only is it impossible for BT to provide enough broadband over copper to cover the community, but ADSL is going to hold back everything."

Daines provides a box which he is offering to install in electricity substations, or anywhere he can run high-speed Ethernet fibre to. "We can get the fibre there cheaply by hanging it over power line poles, or as some communities in the UK are doing, running the fibre through sewers; sewernet is very fast-growing," he said.

What the box does is radically different from any other switching equipment. Most cable TV takes all the channels down the wire to your house, and then the set top box tunes in whichever channel you want to watch, and your cable modem tunes into the IP traffic from the Internet, and your phone pulls out the PSTN links.

By contrast, WWP equipment sends IP traffic to your home only when you request it. You can control what you want; if you want dialtone, you can access it, and you can choose who will provide it. If you want Internet services, you pick your ISP; it's not controlled by the owner of the cable.

"The model for this is to have it as open as the road, the drains, the water supply," said Daines. "It makes no sense to have two or three roads to the house, one for you, one for the deliveries, one for the police; you have an open system which everybody uses. Same for gas supplies, electricity, and internet packets; you have an open system which service providers can access."

Key to making this possible is the high-speed data World Wide Packets provides, but also, there's the issue of getting the right data down.

"We build the equipment for both ends of first-mile fibre. We have a concentrator for blocks of flats or for power poles. We use Ethernet at high speed to provide the pipe; and arrange the equipment so that the individual streams, and ports, can be managed," said Daines.

It's the management which is key to his company. In most Ethernet gear, you have to "take the box down" - reboot the switch system software - while you change the management. And then you bring it up again when you've finished. "But it makes no sense to do this if you are changing just one set of parameters for one subscriber."

So World Wide Packet's flows are all independently manageable, for rate control, for billing, for voice, and all the other aspects of the support systems which the telco has to manage.

"ADSL simply can't keep up with the demands of the home of the future," Daines pointed out. "Think what the home of the future will have in it. The presence of DSL will hold everything back. Itmay go faster than 512Kbits per second - it may get up to two or three megabits. But that will never handle two HDTV sets, RT medical diagnostics equipment, web access requirements, phone connectivity and anything else. You're looking at a minimum of 80 megabits of data for just that; we reckon 100 megabits is the minimum useful offering. No cable company can hope to match that until they upgrade."

But the cable companies and telcos don't have the money. "They have obsolete equipment which they bought with 30 year bonds, which they haven't paid off. The investor community won't lend them money; so they are acting dog in the manger; they will actually try to pass laws banning other people from setting up links. In Virginia, the local telco got such a law passed, and the Federal courts threw it out."

World Wide Packets set up in the UK last May, under David Allen, based in Fleet, Hampshire; the company Web site has full details, and white papers on how communities across the world are taking control of their communications wires away from the telcos, and setting up their own service networks, based on high speed fibre.