Recently by Pauline Rigby

This August marks the anniversary of a key milestone in optics and telecommunications. It has been 50 years since the publication in Physical Review of the scientific paper that described the concept and design of one of the greatest modern inventions — the laser.

Since chairman Serge Tchuruk and chief executive officer Patricia Russo announced their departures from Alcatel-Lucent, there has been intense speculation over who would take the top jobs at the beleaguered telecoms equipment maker.

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, former BT CEO Ben Verwaayen, who was considered a frontrunner to replace Russo, rejected an initial approach from the vendor.

A number of names have been on the short-list, but one that keeps cropping up is Mike Quigley, who this week is named in multiple reports citing French satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaine (translated it means "chained-up duck", which makes a lot more sense when you realise that "canard" is slang for newspaper).

Reports say that the British-born Quigley, who was Alcatel's last chief operating officer before the mega-merger, was overlooked in favour of then-Lucent chief Pat Russo when the time came to pick a CEO for Alcatel-Lucent. He stayed on on the post of "president of science, technology and strategy" before leaving the company last year.

Alcatel-Lucent has said it is looking for a leader who could provide the "fresh and independent perspective", who will take the merger to the next stage, acquiring "a personality of its own, independent from its two predecessors". Apparently a former employee could fit the bill.

Speculation and satire aside, in an interview with French daily newspaper Le Figaro, outgoing chairman Tchuruk said that the new leadership of Alcatel-Lucent would be announced shortly.

Last week the the Industry, Research and Energy Committee (ITRE) and the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee (IMCO) of the European Parliament voted on the European Commission's proposals to reform European telecoms regulations.

To sum up, the parliamentary committees accepted a number of key proposals, including the addition of functional separation to the toolbox of national regulators to stimulate competition. This would give the national regulator the power to require a dominant operator to separate its access network infrastructure and service arms, in order to give other competitors a fair chance to offer services using that infrastructure.

This is a big deal, according to Heavy Reading's Graham Finnie, who asks if functional separation is Europe's secret weapon. But it's not clear, to me at least, who that weapon will be used against.

Functional separation will be invoked as a remedy to ensure competition, competition drives down consumer broadband prices, and that would propel Europe to the front line of the broadband revolution. It's worked out quite well here in the UK, where BT hived off its copper access network into a separate entity, Openreach, back in 2005.

BT, however, has indicated that being forced to share new fibre infrastructure would be a huge disincentive to rolling out a national fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network. Clearly the remedy of functional separation must be handled very carefully if Europe is to avoid shooting itself in the foot when it comes to next-generation access.

As an aside, while I totally agree with Finnie that the European Comission's internet portal is not for the faint-heated, I'm feeling rather smug because I have found a short-cut via EU telecoms commissioner Vivane Reding's homepage, which highlights the key developments in telecoms regulations.

But back to last week's vote. Things didn't all go Reding's way. Although the parliamentary committees voted in favour of creating a new body composed of independent telecoms regulators, to be called the Body of European Regulators for Telecommunications (BERT), it appears that this new structure has substantially less powers than originally proposed. There also seem to be a question mark over how it will be funded. On top of that it has a rather unfortunate acronym that conjures up the image of a geriatric with a white stick — not what they intended I'm sure.

FibreSystems TV filming in Cannes

Looking at this from a philosophical point of view, the reason I'm sitting here tapping out this blog entry is entirely due to the popularity of internet video. Video already comprises 60% of all traffic on the internet, and is pushing the optical networking industry into a renewed period of growth. While experts are still debating exactly how fast internet traffic is increasing, there's no denying that the growth is substantial.

So it seems appropriate that a website that covers optical networking should be choosing video as the new medium for delivering its message. Indeed, how could a website like fibresystems.org not take advantage of the very technologies that its target market enables?

Oliver Ax, owner of Amsterdam's first connected houseboat

If you thought FTTB meant fibre-to-the-building, then you're right, but you're also wrong. Yesterday I was in Amsterdam to get up close and personal with the city's fibre-to-the-home project (more on that to follow), and along certain canalsides in Amsterdam it means fibre-to-the-boat. Yes, Glasvezelnet Amsterdam (GNA), the company that owns the CityNet infrastructure, has connected houseboats to the city's high-speed fibre network, which it reckons — not surprisingly — is a world's first.

A new kind of robust optical connector allows houseboats to physically connect to the network upon mooring, and disconnect when necessary. "I now have ultra-fast internet, TV and telephone connection through one single cable," says Oliver Ax, owner of Amsterdam's first connected houseboat (pictured).

80% of Amsterdam residents live in apartments, and since I didn't see any houses when I was there, does that mean that 20% of them live on houseboats? With all those canals it's certainly possible.

But that's not the most weird and wacky FTTx I heard on my trip. That would have to be fibre-to-the-ice hotel.

Fibre doesn't only get put in the ground, it goes to some interesting places. Here are some short, sharp statistics given to me by cable-maker Draka.

For instance did you know that every Airbus 350 has 500km of Draka cable inside it? Or that the BMW 5 Series has over 3.5km of Draka cable circling its innards. What's more, 52 out of 55 of the world's tallest buildings have Draka fibre inside, the company claims, including the Burj Dubai, which took over from Tapei 101 as the ultimate skyscraper in July 2007 — even though it isn't finished yet.

Draka says it produces enough fibre-optic cable every day to circle the globe. When you consider that Draka is only one of a number of large cable making firms, it all adds up to a mind-boggling amount of fibre being manufactured every day.

Here's hoping for a press trip to see what fibre can do for the world's tallest building — so long as it hasn't fallen down yet.

Probably the best show freebie I've had so far was Google's version of the Rubiks cube. But now I've been given something else to keep me amused on a long-haul flight — Alcatel-Lucent's second edition of Breaking the barriers. What's more according to a press release issued today, Alcatel-Lucent is giving away the first few copies at its NXTcomm booth — don't all rush at once!

Breaking the barriers is pitched as a visionary view of operators' broadband access strategies , a subject that's changing so fast that it was necessary to overhaul the content of the book just 18 months after the first edition was published.

The book itself has a minimalist look, finished with a simple plain white dust jacket. But inside it's far from minimalist — it contains no less than 40 contributions from some of the industry's most forward-thinking minds, and includes carrier perspectives on the evolution of their broadband access networks, case studies and regulatory comment, as well as technical discussions from Alcatel-Lucent experts, of course.

Curious? fibresystems.org will be publishing a selection of articles from the book in our white papers section. UPDATE 23/06/08: The first two papers, Citynet Dynamics in Europe - The State of Municipal Fiber to the Home and Fiber Migration - A French Perspective on Very High-Speed Broadband are now online. Enjoy!

Telepresence seems like a very modern idea. But it turns out that back in 1884 an inventor called Alexander Stanhope St George came up with the a concept called the Telectroscope, an optical device that miraculously allows people to see from London to New York via a tunnel that runs deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean.

St George tried to dig his tunnel and failed, but his papers were found in the attic by his grandson, the artist Paul St George, who claims to have completed the work. The Telectroscope opened this week, and folk can now sign up to communicate with friends or loved ones on the other side of the ocean. But they should remember to take a cellphone or a pen and message board — the link only transmits video. The Telectroscope will remain open until June 15th.

I like the romantic notion that the device works using a transatlantic tunnel, as St George maintains but, rather predictably, it is actually the product of two high-definition cameras connected through a fibre-optic link. Shame.

Ethernet is 35 years old today, according to inventor Bob Metcalfe. "Ethernet's birthday is on May 22nd of this year, and I'm hoping my wife will go out to dinner with me that evening," he told the assembled audience at the OFC/NFOEC show back in February. (And yes, I've been saving up this little factoid ever since).

Ethernet's come a long way since 1973 when it ran at 2.4 Mbit/s, which was a pretty zippy speed for the time. "Imagine my delight at conferences like this where the discussion was whether 300 baud was enough," Metcalfe recalled. "At 600 baud the characters raced past on the screen so fast you couldn't read them anyway, so why would you need a 600 baud modem?"

In 1978 Metcalfe worked on a fibre-optic version of Ethernet, which ran at 150 Mbit/s. "Ironically in 1978 even though we were running at 150Mbit/s with this optical fibre system, the core circuits of the network were running at 50 kbit/s, 3000 times slower," he said. "Needless to say this fibre-optic Ethernet did not take off in 1978, in fact it would be 20 more years before Ethernet went optical again."

The Ethernet we have today has changed almost out of all recognition from the Ethernet of 35 years ago. For starters it's broken out of the LAN and into the wide area network. What's more it has to handle time-sensitive video and voice traffic, something that was never imagined at the start. And of course it's a lot faster. The next hike in speed takes us to 100 Gbit/s, with standards likely to be finalized later this year by the IEEE Higher Speed Study Group. I wonder what Ethernet will look like in another 35 years... because I'd like to bet it will still be with us in one shape or another.

UK prime minister Gordon Brown is embracing the digital age by launching an internet version of Prime Minister's Question Time. Or to put it another way, he's finally cottoned on to the phenomenon of social networking. The initiative certainly seems popular — over 4,000 users have already subscribed to the site — but whether it lives up to expectations remains to be seen. Brown is inviting submissions by 21 June, which seems an awfully long time for a generation reared on instant messaging, and does not guarantee to answer all questions anyway.

I know what my question to the PM would be. The UK government would like fibre-to-the-home to be delivered by the private sector, but the private sector's view is that the market doesn't justify the investment. There's a huge disconnect between the two standpoints, with the result that fibre-to-the home penetration in the UK is virtually zero. How does the government plan to encourage the necessary investment?