November 2008 Archives

The blogosphere is buzzing today with the news that KPN and Reggefiber plan to spend €6–7 billion in an ambitious project to roll out fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) across the whole of The Netherlands over the next 5–7 years.

The Netherlands is currently 12th in the global FTTH rankings, which are compiled every six months by the three FTTH Councils, with fibre reaching 1.4% of the population. This development will certainly move the country up the list.

Of course, it helps that the Netherlands is a relatively small country, with a high population density — the highest in Europe, not counting "island" states like Malta and Gibraltar. There are around 7 million homes to pass, which makes the cost per home around around €1000, and the carriers plan to foot the bill entirely by themselves, without government aid.

The original article breaking the news in Dutch paper Trouw is here, the headline of which translates rather ungracefully as "KPN and Reggefiber stabbing 6 billion in national glasnet".

Artist concept of interplanetary internet. Credit: NASA/JPL

Perhaps being a settler on Mars won't be so tough after all — at least you'll still be able to check your email, if research at NASA comes to fruition.

The US space agency has successfully tested the first deep-space communications network modelled on the internet. In a series of experiments that started last month, NASA engineers transmitted dozens of space images from Earth to a NASA science spacecraft located more than 20 million miles (32 million km) from Earth, and back again, using a network consisting of 10 nodes.

"This is the first step in creating a totally new space communications capability, an interplanetary Internet," said Adrian Hooke, team lead and manager of space-networking architecture, technology and standards at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Vint Cerf, who is Google's vice-president and chief internet evangelist, was instrumental in creating the technology, called Disruption Tolerant Networking, or DTN. The DTN software protocol differs from the normal Transmission-Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) communication suite because it does not assume a continuous end-to-end connection.

The interplanetary internet must be robust enough to withstand delays, disruptions and disconnections in space. For instance, the delay in sending or receiving data from Mars takes between three-and-a-half to 20 minutes at the speed of light. Longer communications blackouts can result when a spacecraft moves behind a planet, or during solar storms.

Unlike TCP/IP on Earth, DTN does not discard the data packets if a destination path can't be found. Instead, each network node keeps custody of the information as long as necessary until it can safely communicate with another node. This store-and-forward method means that information does not get lost when no immediate path to the destination exists. The information always gets to the end-user — eventually.

DTN will be a boon for space communications. "In space today, an operations team has to manually schedule each link and generate all the commands to specify which data to send, when to send it, and where to send it," said Leigh Torgerson, manager of the DTN Experiment Operations Center at JPL. "With standardized DTN, this can all be done automatically."

DARPA is very interested in DTN too, for military applications. And to my mind, this research sounds like it could be quite useful on Earth as well, especially in areas that currently suffer from poor or intermittent network connectivity.

Could Gemfire be the first casualty of the credit crunch? The integrated optics firm is reportedly running short of cash as investors get cold feet and customers push out their orders.

As a result it has abruptly closed down its facility in Livingston, Scotland, with the loss of 250 jobs, says this BBC report. (You may recall that the Livingston plant is the home of the former silica-on-silicon firm Kymata, which was sold to Alcatel Optronics, then to Avanex, and finally to Gemfire.)

The fiesty Scots don't appear to be very happy at this treatment, claiming that the Livingston outfit was the most profitable of the three Gemfire locations, and the order book was full, according to this article in Scottish daily The Herald.

However, UK labour laws apparently don't allow the option of putting the company on ice for two weeks, the tactic the company has employed at its two US locations to see it through the tight spot.

If — and I'd say that's a fairly big if in the current climate — Gemfire manages to conjure up additional funding, either in the form of a new investor or a bridge loan from customers, then it may try to reopen the Livingston factory.