On behalf of the 480-room hotel, he rents a 60Mbps upstream and 60Mbps downstream service from Dutch company DSD Business Internet, and uses two dedicated fibre-optic lines: one for guest internet and one for meetings and conferences.
Since installing the lines last year, it even hosted a surgical conference which featured live, high-definition streaming of operations taking place in two Dutch hospitals – and, using the second line, transported the signal to a satellite conference in Brussels. That just wouldn’t have been possible using an ordinary business DSL connection, van den Berge says.
In fact, city authorities in Amsterdam began building a fibre-to-the-premises [link to article 4] infrastructure in 2006 – in conjunction with commercial investors, under an umbrella company Glazvezel Amsterdam. Around 40,000 homes and businesses are now connected.
“The positive thing about fibre is that it’s flexible,” says van den Berge. “You have an enormous amount of bandwidth which most of the time we won’t need – but if you need it, it’s there. It’s reliable and it gets the job done. It’s no stress.”
Of course, you need “firepower” if you’re going to perform tasks like high-definition video streaming, he says. “Over the past three years since I joined the company, I have seen an increase in bandwidth consumption for conferences, not only for videoconferencing but also high-definition video streaming. Three years ago that was rare; now it’s common.”
But the Netherlands is only one of many frontrunners in the global race to install fibre internet in homes and businesses.
South Korea is the world’s fibre internet leader, with fibre running to 44% of its buildings; Hong Kong has 28% and Japan 27%. Sweden leads the way in Europe, with 400,000 subscribers to fibre-to-the-home or fibre-to-the-building services, as of December 2008. That equates to around 9.5% of homes and businesses in Sweden – compared to about 9% in Norway and 7.5% in Slovenia, according to the FTTH Council.
Of the major European economies, France has the most connections, and rollout of fibre-to-the-home internet is planned; one operator is even installing fibre cables in the sewers of Paris.
Britain currently has only a small number of FTTH connections – though BT is now trialling 100Mbps fibre-to-the-home broadband in Ebbsfleet, Kent, and has plans to roll out fibre-to-the-cabinet internet on a large scale, according to an announcement in July 2009. As British businesses ponder whether to commit to NGA internet, they have only to look at the examples from abroad to see the benefits they can achieve.