France Telecom to trial FTTH

France Telecom announce plans to trial FTTH. Wonder if this is to scare off the Mayor of Paris after his announcement last week?

Fibre to Paris & Amsterdam

Amsterdam and Paris have both announces plans to build a municipally owned Fibre to the Home network. The Amsterdam network will be run by the municipal authority but open to telecoms operators to use. Details on the Paris initiative are a little more sketchy but sounds as though its on the same lines. If these succeed then I’m sure UK municipalities will think hard about it as the first ones to introduce it will attract inward investment into the area as well as generating a new revenue stream.
The encourging status of Verizon’s FiOS FTTP product should encourage UK network providers going straight to FTTH without slowly graduating through slightly better technologies.BT would be in a very strong position if it could offer its IPTV service combined with 100Mbps fibre line.

Net Neutrality RIP?

Recent noises from US telcos look to be putting Net Neutrality in danger. Net Neutrality is where all network traffic is treated equally but telcos are now sounding out the idea of getting ISPs to pay extra to have their traffic prioritised. No doubt BT are keeping a close eye on any precedent set here as it would provide them with a very healthy extra revenue stream.

If the telcos manage to charge the ISPs then who are the ISPs going to charge? If they simply up their price across the board then users all users will be paying the same price for a service of different quality, depending on what network their on. If they decide to only pass on the charges to users then the ISPs will have a billing nightmare. Users might also be tempted to move networks which would lose the telcos revenue too.

This move might also reduce progress on the advancement on the network. Instead of finding the extra network bandwidth needed to meet the demand, Telcos would simply be able shift the prioritisation of traffic around so that non-paying data is reduced to the slow lane.

And what happens when the data crosses multiple networks? As a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, a network is only as fast as its slowest point.

Cable users interested in quad play

A US report says that 46% of cable customers would be interested in quadplay. Don’t know if the profile of the average US cable user is any different to the UK but it backs up NTLs bid for Virgin Mobile.

BBC NEWS | News Front Page

What do you know – justblogit firefox extensions works very nicely. Here’s BBC news – a site I visit far far too often.

Here we go….

This blog is an attempt to put down my thoughts on broadband and technology before it enters the one-way receptacle of my mind. Too much interesting stuff just gets forgotten about too quickly so maybe if I write about it’ll stick in there somehow. If your reading this and your not me then fine but at the moment its really about me archiving things I think are of note. This will either die a death very quickly or will miraculously continue to prove itself to be not as useful as I thought it might.