In the UK 10 million people have never used the internet. It will take four years before just two thirds of the population will have access to "superfast" 24MB broadband. The average broadband user only gets 45 percent of the speed their service provider advertises. The Broadband Stakeholder Group (BSG), the government's main advisory body, says nationwide fibre optic broadband will cost up to £28.8 billion to implement. It's a gloomy picture, but what if it all went away?
Imagine a different image: a country where every single person has access to 400Mbit broadband. Where mobile phone signals are locked on full coverage and connection speeds perform at their theoretical maximums, regardless of location. Imagine an end to digging up the streets, where a nationwide wireless infrastructure need not disrupt busy cities or picturesque countryside. What if the return on investment could be repaid in two years?
It sounds like distant fantasy, but remarkably it isn't. Even more surprising is the technology to make this happen already has commercial installations and will be deployed in the UK this year.
The company behind it is Bluwan, an offshoot of French electronics giant Thales. If the latter's name sounds familiar it is because Thales is a major player in the aerospace and defence sector. Thales developed a technology to send high speed broadband wirelessly with military grade security to troops during the second Gulf War. Realising its commercial potential Thales created Bluwan in 2006 and five years and $20m of R&D later it came up with "Fibre Through The Air" (FTTA).
"The promise with traditional wireless technologies that we've seen in the past is that of over promise and under deliver and that's an uphill battle when you're in the wireless space," explains Bluwan's chief marketing officer Shayan Sanyal. He gestures with his hands, "You have to fight with 'I've heard it all before, what's new?'"
The answer is a lot. The name itself is misleading. Fibre is physical, it cannot be wireless, but it derives from the fact that FTTA is the first wireless technology that can deliver fibre-like speeds without any cables. How it works is as a hugely powerful distribution platform. FTTA connects to a broadband exchange then fires this connection wirelessly using the 42GHz and 12GHz radio bands to areas with slow or no broadband access.
In these areas a 360-degree antenna picks up the wireless signal then broadcasts it to cover a whole town. Each home or office fits an Easter egg-sized satellite and a wire from this goes through a wall and connects to a wireless router or digibox. Like wired fibre connections FTTA bandwidth does not degrade over distance so these homes receive their broadband at speeds as if they were situated right beside the broadband exchange.
"The biggest point of failure of wireless traditionally is it is not going to be as good as fibre," says Sanyal. "It is wireless, the moment it starts raining it's not going to get good service. So we set out to build a system that would provide 99.99 percent availability and 100MB per second to the home, rain or shine."
He leans forward in his chair. "We don't aspire to be an operator, what we would like is for service providers around the world to look at this technology as an alternative to fibre deployment plans. Especially where fibre is going to take years to get to and the return on investment is not fast enough. You hear about digital village funds: people clubbing together to bring broadband to their homes, but even then there are lots of legal issues with private land and rights of way. It's not practical. If you want to provide ubiquitous broadband everywhere then there has to be a change in the economic model. It cannot be a case of a service provider saying 'I'm only going to make money here 10, 15 years from now so I'm not going to build it'. This stunts economic growth, it stunts development of those regions."
The economic model of FTTA is compelling. It uses line of sight technology. This means there must be nothing in the way of the wireless connection at the broadband exchange and the antenna at the destination village where the broadband is distributed. It sounds like a major problem, but in reality Bluwan has turned it into a unique selling point: it uses relays to get around obstacles. These act like mirrors to catch the beam and deflect it. Wherever there is a relay Bluwan can distribute broadband. Consequently in targeting one remote village you can service other villages on the way, even taking deliberate detours to do so.
"We can also use things like trees as high points," Sanyal proclaims. "You can put a relay on a tree and it doesn't matter if it moves around [because] it has a wide beam so you don't miss it and you don't cut anything down. There is no such thing as a bad connection. Whether you're on the edge of the network or two minutes walk away from the broadband exchange it is the same coverage."
Interestingly this is just half the story. FTTA doesn't only distribute fibre optic broadband; it can also distribute 3G, LTE (widely being marketed as 4G) and WiMAX. FTTA compartmentalises too so bandwidth can be reserved for each particular technology or even split between different ISPs and network carriers.
In one particular pilot Sanyal describes how Bluwan connected a small French village in the southeast Alps. Not only was it a broadband black spot, but the end of analogue transmissions had left it without television and it could not make the digital switchover because the village was a protected site. FTTA brought every villager 30 high definition and 100 standard definition streaming TV channels and 100Mbit broadband.
"Different frequencies can be used to transport over different distances," says Sanyol. "Narrow for distance, broad for short range, then 360-degree antennas transmit on every angle in the village. We can transport fibre like speeds for hundreds of kilometres. We've examined over 150 case studies and there is not one we haven't been able to do. Today we deliver 100Mbit, but we can deliver 200Mbit and it can scale to 400Mbit. The bandwidth is not a problem."
Small villages in the Alps aren't Bluwan's only aspiration. It has partnerships with Orange in Slovakia, O2 in the Czech Republic and in Paris the City Council has a live FTTA network. "These tests have allowed us to fine tune the product, bring our costs down and make sure we have a very high quality of service in our transmissions," says Sanyol.
So what of mainstream scenarios? "We will come to market this year with three operators that have licences in the UK. Mobile Broadband Networks Ltd, MML Telecom and UK Broadband. They are not the consumer face, but they are the companies providing the broadband to the ISPs themselves and the 3G networks."
That said, Bluwan won't only work in the background. Sanyal enthuses: "The technology supports fibre, 3G, WiMAX. We can talk as much with ISPs as network carriers. Essentially we can get bandwidth to areas in any form. We can roll out to an area from scratch in four months and at one tenth of the cost of digging up the roads for fibre. A company with 100,000 users can repay their investment in two years. What we are trying to tell providers is don't treat bandwidth as a scarce resource. If you have your fibre or 3G presence in one area and you want to transport it to an area that's rural don't treat that as a scarce resource and don't charge it as a scarce resource and don't manage it like it is a scarce resource because we can bring that bandwidth there."
Right now homes using FTTA must use Bluwan's own wireless routers or digiboxes, the latter of which builds in the router and delivers the streaming TV services of any media partner. Long term Sanyal says the goal is to just have an RJ45 Ethernet socket in the wall connected to the receiver dish and media partners or consumers can plug in whatever equipment they want.
And what of rivals? "It is hard to second guess what others are doing," says Sanyol, but he looks relaxed. "Ericsson is evolving a 42GHz product, but not for the same usage. Our head start is definitely in the years. 15 years of R&D have gone into this product since Thales began and we have IP patents in place."
I ask Sanyal if he thinks the public will become aware of FTTA or if the company's partners will just start providing faster services, fitting customer properties with satellites and playing down the technology behind them. "I would like FTTA to be known," he pauses for a moment. "I think it should be known. Does Bluwan need to be known? Not really.
"Ultimately what I'm fed up with is why an old lady in a village should be sent an invoice for £120,000 for a fibre broadband connection to her home and why businesses end up paying £24,000 per year in leased lines to get decent broadband. There are even cities where rings of fibre were built around the outside, but the money ran out and there's no bandwidth in the centre!"
If Bluwan can address these problems I suspect the same old lady will be shouting its name, from her newly satellite-equipped rooftop.