A couple of weeks ago, a grassroots online campaign started in Italy called the smiling fibre (Fibre che ride) with the following slogan: VDSL? No thanks!
I thought that sounded both surprising and interesting, so I went to the source and discussed the issue with Stefano Quintarelli, major personality in Italian telecoms and ex-manager of the Association of Independant ISPs in Italy.
Stefano resigned all his official functions a while back to report independantly via his blog and launch the Smiling Fibre campaign with no strings attached. I wanted to be able to say that the king was naked if I thought he was, says Stefano. The starting point for this reflection was that Telecom Italia announced a deployment of a VDSL based hybrid fiber infrastructure (see here and here for details).
In Stefano's own words,
Large infrastructure efforts in Italy - railways, tunnels, highways - are widely discussed by polticians, media and people at large. Yet their impact on the future growth of the economy is important but not as relevant as that of the ICT infrastructure. According to recent documents from the EU, ICT contributes up to 50% of the growth of Europe's GDP. Why then are these issues not a matter of public discussion? This is what the Smiling Fiber campaign is about.
Since everyone recognises that there's no economic space for redundant FTTx networks - except in specific, limited cases - if TI pre-empts the field, then that'll be it. For the next 30 years, Stefano says, we will be served by a limited technology, and the whole Italian economy will suffer as a consequence.
Such crucial decisions, Stefano argues, should not be taken by a single privately owned company. Furthermore, such projects should not be limited by the available cash-flow of any one given player. Investing in fiber is expensive, no doubt about it, but what is at stake here is the substitution of a single national network but another national network.
This is how Stefano thinks the issue should be dealt with:
Let's ask ourselves: What kind of network do we want for the next 50 years? What kind of network do we want for our children? What is best for the country? Only then can we work out what it will cost and which technologies get us there.
That's the kind of awareness that the Smiling Fibre campaign is trying to raise. Having politicians and economists recognize this simple fact: the fixed network business has to change and we should think on what we want for the future before decisions are made.
I'm not interested in taking part to the decision, I just want to foster the discussion says Stefano. The results so far are encouraging:
Many, many ex-colleagues in Italy (and quite a few in the rest of Europe as well) - industry and financial analysts, industry insiders, journalists, etc.- have privately expressed me warm support and fed me with information. Most of them unfortunately are not in a position to express themselves in public. More interestingly, according to Google there are now some 82.000 web pages on the Internet talking about the "fibra che ride".
Everyone in Italy who is relevant in this industry, a large chunk of the user community and user associations and most political parties' offices know of this campaign. Some industry workshops and political meetings have already started saying that maybe the king is not fully dressed, and I know of some others to follow that will go into more detail.
I think this is a very interesting initiative, and most likely not one that should be limited to Italy. What do we think the impact of network technologies is on the business efficiency and attractiveness of a country? Here in France many local governments have deployed dark fiber networks because ISPs and operators wouldn't even deploy DSL in their towns and territories. Why, then, should the reflexion not be more global, at least at the level of single country?
I think Stefano's approach is the right one. These issues need to be discussed at a political level with individuals and entrepreneurs understanding the impact on their day to day life and on their businesses. I hope the Smiling Fibre generates discussions in the months to come, and hopefully pushes some governments to reconsider their positions - or lack thereof - in that respect. Just because telecoms have largely been liberalised doesn't mean that regulators and government can just hide behind the couch and wait for others to take difficult decisions in their stead. After all, the most advanced countries as far as FTTx is concerned are Korea and Japan - both with heavy public financing - and I don't think it's exactly harming their economic competitivenes...
