Shape of things to come

May 31, 2011
For an informed view on connected entertainment in the UK & Ireland, visit Cue Entertainment 

Technologists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany have set the record for high-speed data transmission fast enough to power 400 million simultaneous phone calls or download 700 DVDs per second. They used a single beam of laser light, split into a spectrum of different colours, to achieve speeds of two and a half times the theoretical limit, processed data a million times faster than ever before and delivered it over a 50 km link.

The data rate achieved by KIT, over what the institute refers to as an “ultra-rapid” connection, is 26,000 billion bits per second. That’s 26 terabits per second (Tbps), which is enough to deliver approximately 1.5 Gbps to every household in the UK.

Such speeds would be a very welcome boon to a range of new online services. The internet struggles currently to keep pace with the demands of broadband video and for some content types operators restrict access to an overloaded network. At the speeds achieved by KIT, network congestion becomes a non-issue and “cost per megabyte” becomes as inconsequential as it is today on hard disk drives.

Media financial analyst SNL Kagan reports that the UK and France lead the deployment of Over The Top (OTT) video, which delivers premium content over the open internet rather than via dedicated cable or IPTV connections. Amazon will need ultra-rapid broadband to meet its European promises for a Video On Demand service from Lovefilm, and Google requires similar capacity to make a success of its feature film rental service on YouTube. With so much content that uses so much data, deployment of terabit broadband networks must come sooner rather than later.

“Multi-platform video continues to gain momentum. New players in Europe, including Lovefilm, are working to align content, distribution, brand and business model into sustainable businesses,” says SNL Kagan Media and Communications Analyst Mohammed Hamza.

The YouView project in the UK and equivalent HbbTV services in France and Germany will increase the demands on bandwidth that began with YouTube and BBC iPlayer. Telecom companies are vocal in their complaint that they have to bear all the costs to expand network capacity while content providers reap the rewards. Their response has been to cap consumer bandwidth and “shape” the traffic in peak hours, to the extent that some broadband subscribers are unable to watch OTT video at the times they want to.

The masts of mobile phone operators are often in remote locations, with a limited electricity supply. The low power requirements of the KIT laser would make it possible to link these masts to a high-speed network and provide wireless broadband to a much wider community. It also opens up the possibility of simultaneous video transmission over the internet to a national audience at a cost equivalent to the distribution of broadcast television.

For the moment, this technology is confined to the research department but it must be the shape of things to come. Fibre optics is a wonderful thing that already replaces copper at many points in the network and makes inroads into the home with plastic optical fibre a safe and practical alternative to WiFi. Shine a flashlight down a glass pipe and most of the light comes out at the other end. Switch the light on and off quickly enough and you have the basis of a signalling system. Increase the brightness with a laser, speed up the flashing and you can connect the world.

The results from KIT show that a single laser with minimal energy consumption can deliver the extremely high bit rates that will be required in the near future. At its best, current technology can deliver 0.1 Tbps. KIT demonstrated an alternative that is 260 times faster and team leader Professor Juerg Leuthold says that this is just the start: “Our result shows that physical limits are not yet exceeded even at these extremely high data rates.”

Prof. Leuthold says that the work of the university is ahead of development elsewhere: “A few years ago these data rates were deemed utopian, even for systems with many lasers and anyway there would not have been any applications. Today, the situation is different.”

To connect the UK has proved rather more dystopian than utopian. A report from broadband analysts Point Topic published earlier this month suggests that delivery of next-generation broadband networks from BT and others (but excluding Virgin Media) has fallen a long way behind. Apart from claims that work on the infrastructure is behind schedule, which BT disputes, where it is available the take-up of superfast (up to 40Mbps) broadband is significantly lower than anticipated.

The forecast for superfast (up to 40Mbps) broadband connections by 2015 is cut by a third from a planned 8.8 million to 6.7 million lines, according to Point Topic Chief Analyst Tim Johnson. The report claims that BT had intended to enable 343 exchanges across the country by December 2010, though in the event, just 182 were completed.

BT counters that the actual number of fibre exchanges enabled by the end of last year was “in excess of 330”, although the company acknowledges that connecting an exchange is not the same as connecting the consumer. BT claims: “We are close to passing five million premises with the technology, rising to 10 million by 2012 and two-thirds of the UK by 2015. We’ve also announced plans to double the headline speed of our main fibre broadband product, from up to 40Mb/s to up to 80Mb/s in 2012.”

Ofcom reports that average download speeds in Britain have increased markedly over the past year as consumers move to faster broadband services. By the end of last year, according to their most recent statistics, 42% of UK broadband connections had a headline speed above 10 Mbps. This compares well with the figure of 24% in May 2010 but in other countries things have moved ahead more rapidly.

Britain languishes currently in 33rd place in the “Household Download Index”, the “real world” league table of international broadband speeds. Broadband test specialists Ookla compiles the data through its Speedtest.net site and uses billions of test results from 170 countries around the world. South Korea tops the chart with an average consumer download speed of 32.5 Mbps while Bolivia is in last place at 0.43 Mbps.

Although Ofcom reports that the UK average in December 2010 was 6.2 Mbps, which would put us in 58th place alongside Papua New Guinea, the Ookla data is more generous. In May last year, the measured speed was 7.6 Mbps while the rolling average over the past month was 10.9 Mbps. Parts of the UK have clearly moved ahead although in rural Kent, home to “Eye On The Supply”, the connection speed is 0.69 Mbps, slightly below the average in Bangladesh, which is in 166th place.

Good news comes this week from Kansas, the 15th largest state in the US. The 2,600-mile fibre optic network, which brings the high-speed internet to rural areas there, will be complete by the end of this summer. It has taken just two years to construct the independent Kansas Fibre Network (KFN), which will have cost $28 million by the time it is ready.

Customers in remote parts of the state have been paying up to $70 per megabyte until now but KFN President Steven Dorf says, “With KFN we can bring down that cost by half, which then makes it much more attractive and available to subscribers in rural areas.”

Sometimes things look so much better over the rainbow.