Tag: European Union

Article

Broadband for rural areas: financed by the EIB and WIBank | European Union Press Releases

My Comments

Some more public money has been put up in the European Union towards facilitating next-generation Internet in rural Europe. This time, it is taking place in the middle of Germany.

Here, the European Investment Bank had put €80m towards Hessen government’s promotional bank (WIBank) to lend to companies to develop next-generation broadband in that state. They want to have this service pass pass 75% of households by 2014 with a desirable throughput of 50Mb/s.

It is seen to be part of “Digital Agenda For Europe” which is needed to satisfy increased data volumes that are now occurring in Europe. Hessen’s main urban centres like Wiesbaden and Frankfurt have the high-throughput infrastructure but there is a desire to get the high-speed broadband out to peri-urban areas, small towns and rural areas.

This may require building out of VDSL2 infrastructure in more of the towns and establishing the FTTP fibre-optic infrastructure in the dense areas like most of Frankfurt. Personally, I would also like to see the VDSL2 infrastructure moved towards FTTC (fibre-to-the-curb) where there are the shorter runs so as to increase the bandwidth available.

The Hessen broadband development is being set up to permit competitive business but is also to be seen by the European Union as an example of a next-generation urban-rural broadband deployment.

It is another of the European publicly-funded broadband-improvement developments that needs to be observed by countries considering the implementation of broadband improvements using public money.

Article – French language

L’UE appelle à la création d’un « Airbus des puces » | Le Monde Informatique (France)

My Comments

The European Union does play host to some electro-technical activity, whether in the form of research or design and manufacture of finished product. Think of names like Philips, Pace (set-top box applications), Loewe, B&O, Nokia and Siemens amongst many others when it comes to finished applications. Or you may think of Acorn who has built up the ARM microarchitecture used in most smartphones and tablets or B&O who have built up the ICEPower reference design for high-quality Class-D switching power amplifiers. As far as semiconductors and microelectronics are concerned, STMicroelectronics is the only European representative in the 10 main semiconductor companies.

But there has been a call for the European Union to strengthen a European-grown microelectronics industry. They effectively want to see a “digital Airbus” or “Airbus for semiconductors”. This is where Airbus, the France-based European aerospace name, has become associated with building the impressive airliners like the A380 superjumbo and been in a position to challenge established players like he US-based Boeing.

Here, the European Commission wants to launch an industrial plan to seed the European semiconductor industry by making Europe financially attractive to invest in for this industry. This encompasses the research and development aspect; as well as production of the components; and they want the European Union and its constituent Member States to work together on this.

What I see of this is that the European “finished-products” names could move towards the local “Airbus for semiconductors” once they see that the products can work well with their finished-product designs. Similarly, if this company can answer established firms like Intel, AMD and NVIDIA for CPU or graphics-processor designs, this could be a chance for Europe to facilitate a lively competitive microprocessor market.

 thinkbroadband :: European USO could interrupt government plans

My comments and summary

The European Commission are looking in to the idea of a standard for baseline broadband Internet service across the European Union. This is based on certain factors where the UK’s fixed broadband coverage is 99% whereas the average across the European Union is 93% with the EU’s rural areas clocking in at 77%. In my opinion, these figures don’t quote a minimum service speed “at the door” for any of the ADSL services.

The issues they were raising include:

• competitive service provision to European-Union standards, especially in rural areas
• access to the Internet service by disadvantaged groups such as disabled people, people on low means and people who are in remote areas
• Minimum service speed
• How should the universal service be funded
• Should the standard be determined by the European-Union nations themselves or by the European Commission in Brussels

Competitive Service Provision

I had used the DegroupNews website to observe how ADSL Internet service was being provided through France, and that there were many service providers in the population-dense areas whereas the population-sparse areas were serviced by one operator. A very good example of this was the département of Alpes-Maritimes (16) which has the cities of Nice and Cannes. Here, all the exchanges covering areas near the seaboard had many operators, with those big resort cities had many operators whereas the towns in the Alps had just one operator.

If you don’t have the same level of competitive service in a geographic area as you do in another geographic area, there is an increased likelihood of the dominant operator providing poor service quality or taking time to roll out service and technology improvements to that area.

Disadvantaged groups

A common issue that may be raised would be provision of broadband service to disadvantaged groups like the disabled, people on low incomes and people who live in remote areas. The cost of providing computer-usage-aids to disabled people is reducing because of various imperatives like the ageing population, civil-rights measures that include disability access, increased use of standard hardware / software interfaces and easy-to-implement software modifications. This group of users, along with the elderly, may also benefit from having broadband service included in to communications-access welfare measures like telephony-service benefits that are part of pensions and benefits.

This heading also includes economically-disadvantaged groups such as the unemployed or those on low income. It should also include provisions to prohibit service providers from “redlining” service out of economically-disadvantaged areas in a similar pattern to what happened in major cities in the USA through the 40s to the 60s. As well, there may be issues raised about minimum bandwidth to be made available for “social” or “low-cost” private services as well as the provision of public-access facilities in the form of “cybercafé-style” terminals and/or Wi-Fi hotspots; and cost-effective broadband service for community organisations.

It also includes providing broadband Internet service to remote communities, whether through a wireless technology like WiMAX; extending wired technology to these communities or a mixture of both methods. This will also encompass the issue of providing any extra consumer-premises hardware that is needed to receive broadband under these conditions. 

The standard network speed

An issue that is also being raised is what should be the defined headline speed for the universal service. Some countries may run on either 512kbps or 1Mbps for the standard speed but the UK is preferring to call 2Mbps as the standard for universal broadband service. As well, the European Commission are showing a preference for a 2Mbps service as the baseline standard.

Funding of the universal broadband service

The question of funding the costs of meeting universal broadband service targets is a similar one to how the cost of providing universal telephone service was met. Here, there isn’t an established broadband Internet service provider in the same way that there was an established telephone service provider. This is although in most European countries, the established telephone service provider such as the “PTTs” or the telephone spinoffs such as British Telecom or France Télécom ran a basic online service in the form of a “viewdata” service and had established their own retail ISP services.

One method that may be considered easy would be for the established ISP to bear the costs themselves and end up charging steep prices for discretionary services like what has happened with the established telephone services. On the other hand, there could be a universal-service fund similar to what is established in the USA for the provision of the universal telephone service. This could be funded by all Internet providers through a levy charged to all customers’ services which the UK was proposing or a turnover-based tax, or simply the national government or European Commission to offset this through line-item spending.

A similar argument that may be raised is whether the nations should fund the universal service themselves or rely on the powers-that-be in Brussels to manage the funding.

Should the standard be determined at national level or European-Union level

This issue is being raised because some countries in the European Union, most notably the UK, France and Germany have made headlong progress in achieving the goal of the universal broadband Internet service. Some countries, such as the UK, have also achieved highly-ambitious standards like 2Mbps as the baseline speed.

The national vs European-level determination may affect whether countries are able to compete more easily in the European single market and whether an advanced country should be “pegged down” by lower baseline standards that may be determined to accommodate countries with not-so-advanced Internet infrastructure or expectations.

Conclusion

Other countries and country groups that are outside the remit of the European Union should observe what is being decided in Brussels for the universal broadband Internet service so they can know what is expected for such a basic level of service and what factors should be looked at when determining this expectation.

 Les éditeurs de navigateurs se mobilisent contre Microsoft – DegroupNews.com (France – French language)

My comments on this situation

There is still some disquiet in the European Union regarding the Browser Choice Screen that Microsoft launched in that market on 1 March 2010 to satisfy the European Commission’s anti-trust issue concerning their delivery of Internet Explorer 8 as the standard browser for the Windows platform.

The main issue was that the only browsers that were immediately visible to the user were the “top 5” desktop browsers – Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Opera. The user had to “pan” the menu rightwards to see the other browsers like Maxthon, GreenBrowser, K-Meleon and Flock. This had annoyed the developers of these alternative browsers, some of which were “super-browsers” built on either the Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer codebases and were endowed with extra features.

These browser developers want the European Commission to mandate an easily-identifiable visual cue as part of the Browser Choice Screen user-interface to indicate more browsers available. This is even though there is a scroll-bar of variable width under the browser list that can be dragged left and right to reveal the other browsers.

Personally, I would also look into the idea of an alternative user-interface layout in the form of a 6 x 2 grid for the browser-selection part rather than the current “ribbon” menu. This can cater for more browsers to be shown to  the user, but the downside would be that it requires more screen real-estate which limits its utility on smaller screens like netbooks. It may also make the user-interface more cluttered and intimidating.

It is certainly a situation that reminds me of many council planning-permission fights that I have read about in various local newspapers whenever one of the big American fast-food chains like KFC or McDonalds wants to set up shop in a neighbourhood. A very constant argument that I read of in these reports is that the fast-food chain’s logo and colour scheme stands out like a sore thumb against all the other small cafés that had existed previously in that area. The alternative browser developers like Maxthon see themselves as the small café who is put out of business by the “big boys” (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer & co) who are seen in a similar light to McDonalds, KFC & co.