Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
BACKGROUND
developments taking place in the electronic com-
munications markets. Prestona & Cawleyb (2008)
refer that the European Commission (EC) has
pushed broadband to the fore of social and eco-
nomic policies in recent years. The same direction
adopted by many many national governments in
Europe. It has aligned broadband developments
with furthering information society and knowledge
economy developments. To this direction, EC has
been particularly active in promoting broadband
developments. In particular, the EC adopted
an initiative supporting the Lisbon 2010 goals,
i2010 (EU (2005).), where broadband take-up is
considered an important factor for the emerging
digital economy and competitiveness.
The main focus of this chapter is to summarize
lessons learned from implementing (a) country-
wide strategies formulated at the national level,
and (b) local strategies formulated by the munici-
palities. The policies adopted by these countries
for supporting the broadband growth could be
proved very beneficial for countries with very
low broadband penetration rate.
The rest of the chapter is structured as fol-
lows: the next section presents the current status
and trends concerning the broadband deployment
worldwide. The third section describes the im-
pact of broadband in the economy of a country.
The fourth section presents the advantages of
broadband technologies and their positive impact
concerning Green Information Technology (IT)
infrastructures. The fifth section presents the role
of governments in the deployment of broadband as
well as the advantages of the broadband services
for a country. The sixth section presents broadband
policies adopted and applied in various countries as
well as these policies proposed by European Union
(EU) and Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and Development (OECD). The next section pres-
ents best practices concerning the deployment of
broadband networks. The eighth section presents
suggestions for broadband deployment, while the
last section (i.e. “Conclusions”) summarises the
results of this chapter.
This section presents the current status and
trends concerning the development of broadband
networks. According to Berkman Center for In-
ternet and Society (2009) these networks offer
the highest available speed, by using fixed line,
fixed wireless, or mobile infrastructure. These
networks are deployed in households and business
places. Therefore they are mainly deployed at high
population areas and business centres.
The emphasis concerning the development of
these networks is on fixed Fibre To The Home
(FTTH) solutions.
However, there are still operators adopting
VDSL or VHDSL (Very High speed DSL) tech-
nology (ITU-T, 2004). Examples are Tele2 in
Netherlands (Telecompaper, 2009) and Vodafone
in Heilbronn, Germany (Telegeography, 2009).
VDSL is a DSL technology providing faster data
transmission over a single flat untwisted or twisted
pair of copper wires. Therefore VDSL is capable
of supporting high bandwidth applications such
as High Definition Television (HDTV), as well
as telephone services (such as Voice over IP)
and general Internet access, over a single con-
nection. VDSL is deployed over existing wiring
used for POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service)
and lower-speed DSL connections. This standard
was approved by ITU in November 2001. The
second-generation of VDSL, namely VDSL2
(ITU-T G.993.2 approved in February 2006),
supports bandwidth of up to 30 MHz and provides
data rates exceeding 100 Mbit/s simultaneously
in both the upstream and downstream directions.
The maximum available bit rate is achieved at a
range of about 300 meters. However, performance
degrades as the loop attenuation increases. VDSL2
is relatively inexpensive solution, in case that the
operator has already a fibre backhaul and ADSL2+
network. Table 1 compares ADSL, ADSL2+,
VDSL1 and VDSL2.
However, a pure FTTH solution is the more
promising solution for many countries. As re-
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