Ronan Kelly is the president of the Fiber To The Home (FTTH) Council Europe. His mission is to connect all of Europe to high-speed optical fiber cables, leading us towards ‘Gigabyte society’. And for that, he says, photonics is indispensable.
During the Integrated Photonics Conference at the High Tech Campus Eindhoven on September 27th Ronan Kelly connected the dots between the innovation in photonics and the adoption of fiber based broadband services. We asked the Irishman about his love of all things fiber.
Why is fiber so important? “The world is transitioning into the so-called fifth generation of access, with innovations on all layers of access technology. The most common one we’ve all heard about is 5G, but we’ll also see the arrival of new PON standards and fibre extension technologies like G.fast. Where existing access technologies are operating with a capacity between 1 MB and 2,5 GB per second in the downstream direction, these new technologies have a capacity of 10 GB/s, both downstream and upstream. Fiber is the only medium that will allow that kind of internet speed. So you could argue that fiber is essential to enable the future Gigabyte society.”
What is the role of photonics in this transition? “Fiber and photonics are inextricably linked. You can compare it with a railway system, where fiber represents the tracks and photonics is the high-speed train that runs on it. Apart from photonics, there’s not really anything else that can take advantage of that high-speed fiber infrastructure. And photonics is the cost driver. The lower the cost of the photonics equipment, the lower the cost to build a 5G network and the quicker it can be built. The beauty is that for making these new speeds available, you only have to install photonics on either end of the path of optical infrastructure. You don't have to rip out the old fiber and replace it with the new.”
How much of the Internet is running an optical fiber right now? “Fundamentally, the entire backbone of the Internet, all the core networks and metropolitan distribution networks, is 100% fiber today. But when it comes to the end users of the Internet, it’s a different story. Fiber infrastructure within Europe today passes about 60 million households, which means they are economically viable to connect to fiber through their service operator. Of these, about 18 million are actually connected. The US has about 13 million connections, but their growth rate is increasing. Companies like Google are investing heavily there, which is catalyzing further US investments in fibre by other operators.”
What are the main advantages of fiber, apart from faster internet speeds? “Reliability is one of the key things. Copper cables corrode overtime, which leads to poor performance, but fiber does not. Copper technologies can also suffer from latency issues [delays in data communication], whereas fiber literally moves at the speed of light. One of the key reasons why we are trying to encourage governments and telecom operators to invest in fiber infrastructure is because it is future proof. We’re forecasting the rise of autonomous vehicles that will communicate with each other and with the cloud, predominantly over short range wireless links, which are backhauled over fibre. In that scenario the last thing you want is a slow performing network. Everything has to be as close and real-time as possible. The same goes for new technologies like virtual reality, which induces motion sickness if the interaction is not felt at the real-world speed. Not to mention the side effects of remote surgeries, should the network impede the surgeon. So there the latency has to be ultra short. For those services to really take off you are dependent on either full fiber-to-the-home or fiber very close to the home.”
