Project Number: FP6-IST-507554 Project Title: BROADBAND in ...

4. Introduction
Page 12 of 319
FP6-IST-507554/JCP/R/Pub/D2.2-3.2
This report is the second deliverable of the FP6-project “Broadband in Europe for all: a multi-disciplinary
approach project (BREAD)”. It is a multi-technological analysis of the ‘broadband for all’ concept, with an
update of the listing of multi-technological key issues, a first gap analysis and first roadmaps on how to tackle
these issues.
This document builds further on the first BREAD-deliverable (available via www.ist-bread.org). This
deliverable (D2.1-3.1) focused on the multi-technological and multi-disciplinary analysis of the ‘broadband for
all’ concept with emphasis, and restricted to the ‘state of the art’ in the multi-technological domains and ‘what’s
happening now’ in some of the countries of importance to the broadband deployment. That first deliverable
collected information on ongoing regional and national initiatives in Europe and around the world. In addition,
the deliverable identified initiatives, which the project team intended to contact for further collaboration and
exchange of ideas and information. The document also evoked new contacts which were fed into the present
deliverable.
After some more general remarks concerning the projects and organisations involved in the “Broadband for
All”-concept (section 5 on “Related projects and standardisation”) the convergence of services, networks,
terminals and markets is discussed in section 6 on “ICT convergence”. The convergence of different
technologies, platforms and access possibilities and how the overall ICT convergence trends will influence the
broadband development is discussed with a view to the regulatory and market challenges implied by
convergence.
The BREAD project has now updated the information on all major technologies involved, which were already
identified in its first deliverable. This information is based on the contacts and input from other sources (FP6projects,
national projects, international organisations,…) and is presented in section 7 on “Broadband
technologies summary”. Some of these technologies need, to our opinion, a closer look, because of their general
importance (e.g. security,…) or because it is considered as a major technological solution (cable, FTTx,…).
These areas are worked out in more detail and are presented in a separate section in “Annex 2 – More
information”. For all areas discussed in section 7 on “Broadband technologies summary”, an overview is given
of the (updated) “state-of-the-art” in that area, a short summary of the socio-economic issues, together with a
listing of projects and organisations involved in this specific area. For all these areas also a first “gap analysis” is
presented, together with a first “roadmap”. This deliverable also synthesises these multi-technological areas and
identifies and derives a list of common issues that need further attention and interaction (security, management
& control, …).
The relative importance of the various technical bottlenecks identified in the BREAD vision depends to a large
extent on the evolution of actual usage patterns. The evolution of these patterns, in turn, is based on the available
and emerging applications and technologies, underlying social behaviour, and social and organisational practices
that create communication and information processing needs. Social, economic and technical forces are
interdependent and create a complex field of development where technological opportunities become articulated
and implemented, first in the laboratory or in field trials, and then on a societal scale. Only at that point of wide
societal use, new technologies become "real" in the broader economic and societal sense. Accurate localisation
of the critical bottlenecks of the BREAD vision as well as its effective realisation will therefore require a good
understanding of the socio-economic and technological drivers of the alternative developmental paths.
Benchmarking and comparative analyses of broadband development practices and schemes in an international
context are also an important study item, to identify current and future roadblocks.
This multi-disciplinary aspect of the “Broadband for all”-concept becomes clear in section 8 on "Market
developments & policy aspects”. In this section, all EU25 and some other interesting non-EU countries are
being studied. This section contains a general description of the market developments within electronic
communication networks in particular broadband networks. Furthermore general regulatory aspects and the
implications of these are described. In addition a number of country cases are included. The purpose of these
country cases is to provide insights both in regional success stories and failures and to enable a further analysis
of the reasons for why some countries have been more successful than others. This includes identification of
drivers, barriers, bottlenecks and technologies impacting the penetration of broadband.
An analysis is presented with factors affecting broadband development first from a classical theoretical
framework, which is composed of the supply/demand - infrastructure/content matrix. However, when drawing
on the elements which were identified in the country studies, it then uses a framework composed of four
categories, i.e. country configuration, legacy situation, competition, and public policy, where the key criterion is
the susceptibility of the factors affecting broadband to be themselves influenced by broadband policy. This