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New Applications on
Display in Paris
Our roving reporter has seen the future, and it works….or, rather, teleworks.
Smart grid and health care applications are gaining traction, too.
By John Schultz ■ U-reka Broadband Ventures
The 2009 Alcatel-Lucent
Enterprise Forum held in
Paris in March provided
glimpses of some interesting
applications to fill
the broadband pipe enabled by fiber to
the premises. It also offered an opportunity
to catch up on the development of
FTTP networks in both Europe and the
United States.
Telework in the Arctic
The Forum provided many ideas for service
providers looking to layer additional
applications across their networks. One of
these was telework – specifically the ability
for enterprises to make their corporate
systems available in a secure environment
to their home-based employees.
The municipality of Arvidsjaur in
sparsely populated northern Sweden,
close to the Arctic Circle, is trying to lure
residents from elsewhere in Europe. In
case the stunning scenery and Northern
Lights aren’t enough to draw crowds, the
city has built an open access fiber network
(using GPON equipment and more than
600 km of fiber) that allows access to the
telecommunications services required for
telework applications. According to Glen
Ericsson, a representative of the network
operator CityNet, the incumbent telco,
Telia, does not ride over the municipal
network – but, interestingly, Verizon uses
the network to provide a high-capacity
circuit to an automobile testing facility
in the area.
FTTP and the Smart Grid
Dr. Mike Browder, CEO of Bristol Tennessee
Essential Services, provided an
We do not have to wait for electric utilities
to deploy their own networks in order to
deliver smart grid applications. Instead, the
utilities can deliver these applications through
partnerships with incumbent or competitive
telecommunications providers.
update on BTES’ fiber-to-the-premises
deployment and the synergies between
the energy and telecommunications
sides of the business. Dr. Browder said
that while the network was originally
built to facilitate economic development
(as he put it, “FTTP to every home
means each home is a potential business
incubator”), the capabilities of the network
had also improved the reliability
and the use of the electric grid.
One of the electric grid applications
includes the use of Carina Technology’s
home gateway to assist customers in
managing their hot water heaters, and
potentially to allow them to manage
other home appliances in the future. Dr.
Browder said that since deployment of
the fiber-to-the-premises system in Bristol,
electric outage times had fallen by
25 percent. Because the GPON system
does not rely on commercial power to
continue working (there are batteries in
the home and generators in the central
office), it can be used to pinpoint exactly
where an electrical outage was initiated.
Christian Muller-Elschner of T-Systems
(a division of Deutsche Telecom)
spoke about his company’s smart metering
pilot program in Friedrichshafen,
Germany. Under an arrangement with
electrical service providers, T-Systems
installs a smart meter and a gateway in
each home to gather, store and distribute
information about electrical usage in the
home. This system uses DSL and GRPS
(cellular) backhaul to bring the information
back to the T-System servers, where
both the utility and the end user can access
and use the information.
Currently the home gateway can
store up to three months of data, but
with a fiber-to-the-premises network this
information could be shared instantly
with the network servers to allow endusers
to make real-time decisions about
their electrical usage. The T-Systems
application can also gather information
about natural gas usage. In the future,
T-Systems envisions “micro-reading” all
appliances within the home to give residents
even more detailed information
about their utility usage.
The fact that it is the telecommunications
provider, not the electric utility,
delivering the service implies that we do
not have to wait for electric utilities to
deploy their own networks in order to
deliver smart grid applications. Instead,
they can deliver them through partner-
30 | BROADBAND PROPERTIES | www.broadbandproperties.com | April 2009