Presenters from Amsterdam, Burlington, and Lafayette said that open fiber is what their community needs.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [April 18, 2008]

At the Freedom to Connect open fiber session, Dirk van der Woude, of the City of Amsterdam, spoke first. With a light irony that may or may not be characteristically Dutch, he pointed out that corporations from The Netherlands no longer own most of the networks of Holland and its former colonies. He said that 40 percent are owned by U.S. companies, 30 percent by UK companies, and 16 percent are owned by what he called "Putin and company."

He said that some people in The Netherlands listened to Friederich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who believed in privatization. Now they regret it.

In 2005, the City of Amsterdam announced its intent to deploy fiber. "Fiber to the home enables our city to compete with other cities," he said. The project is called citynet. The network is open. The European Commission immediately investigated this but decided eventually that it was not an illegally subsidized business.

One of the back channel discussions at F2C was about whether or not internet infrastructure is like roads. Van der Woude said that Holland has a national highway system that inspired the U.S. general Dwight D Eisenhower to build something similar in the U.S. Amsterdam needed new infrastructure to replace its previous competitive advantage, a port that was Holland's most important until it lost out to Rotterdam.

"Each industrial revolution is underpinned by new infrastructure," he said. "Underinvestment is like osteroperosis."

Van der Woude said that Norway is the only European nation with upload speeds of over 1 Mbps, and that highway designers always have to choose between making the highway fast and making it accessible to all. In the back channel, Isenberg pointed to Benkler's essay on this topic, Sharing Nicely.

The industry in Holland could not work the way they do in Japan, which plans to reach 30 million fiber to the home connections in 3 years. Nor does he like the U.S. plan, which involves what he called the VDSL DBLAM!

Amsterdam is not the only place in Europe building fiber. Van der Woude cited the city of Cologne (Koln), the city of Vienna, and the French department of Hauts de Seine.

In Amsterdam, the fiber project has a nationalist pitch on its side too. Van der Woude said that 70 percent of children under 18 in Amsterdam have parents or grandparents who were not born in The Netherlands, so the project will deliver 1 Gbps to every school in order to help introduce school children to Dutch culture.

The next challenge: getting indpendent ISPs to deploy on this open network. Van der Woude says few, if any, are left in Holland.

Futher reading: Dave Farber's comments from 2005, including:

Not to put words in anyone's mouth, but I think the message is something like:

It may be "your network" and "your investment" you are trying to defend, but your customers are our taxpayers, our society, and we have a duty to look beyond the next quarter and where our share options are at present. Access to information is an essential building block of social development, like access to water and electricity. Highly-contended DSL products with bandwidth caps ain't gonna cut it.

Fiber in Vermont
The next speaker was Tim Nulty of Burlington Telecom. The network is open, but Burlington Telecom does offer services, Nulty said. "If you don't, you will go broke."

The network has to pay for itself and cannot use taxpayer money. Nulty said that it had to be fiber because it had to be future proof.

"The operation in Burlington is already successful. We will achieve actual profitability about nine months from now with 10,000 customers, even though 85 percent of the town has DSL available and 100 percent has cable modem. We're eating their lunch."

Nulty has resigned from Burlington Telecom in order to show other Vermont towns how to build similar networks. So far, he says, there have been votes in many towns on proposals to build fiber. The lowest vote, he says, was 80 percent in favor and in many towns, the proposal passed unanimously. Some towns are at 35 to 47 percent penetration after only 3 months in operation.

"We're one generation ahead of FiOS," he said. "Theirs is BPON and ours is GPON."

Fiber in Louisiana
The final speaker was John St. Julien, who among other responsibilities blogged the Lafayette fiber buildout.

Of the three speakers, St. Julien had to fight the largest quantity of FUD. The local cable and phone monopolies did not want their oligopoly disrupted. They spent a lot of money: SBC spent $192,324 and Comcast spent $89,740.

"We're offended because we're not being treated with respect by our current providers," said St. Julien. "We're clients. In most senses of the word, we're no better than serfs. They can kick you off for no reason and say so in the TOS. It's structured arrogance. They say so in the TOS. They say they don't have to follow their own rules."

"Lafayette, my community is a case in point. This is a hopeful thing. Lafayette is one of the most conservative cities in one of the most conservative states in this corporate-besotten USA. It is an oil town and proud of it."

A conservative oil town, he implied, is the last place you'd expect to find a grass roots movement.

The people in power tried to prevent the project, St. Julien said, but did so with an obnoxiousness that catalyzed a grass roots movement that started out with yard signs and websites and culminated in radio and even television ads.

He showed one community-produced TV ad that featured a slick car salesman trying to pass off a bicycle (cable) as "functionally equivalent" to an automobile (fiber).

"My conclusion is: you need to want to own it."

Nulty added that people want to know who's going to pay for the fiber and the only right answer is "you won't."

Van der Woude said his effort required a very high caliber lawyer and winning two EU court cases.

The political powers that be, from the local mayor to the federal government, will fight you if you try to build open fiber. But you can win.

— End