Dark fibre: Don't be afraid of the dark

Networking pioneer Bill Laing is convinced that dark fibre loops are the way forward for UK regions. Tony Harrington shares his Californian dream

Forget, if you haven?t already, ancient talk of information super highways. The future is dark fibre ? contentless fibre optic loops organised on a town-by-town basis, to be rented out to whoever fancies their chances as a so-called content provider.

Who is to set up such loops? Bill Laing, a corporate consulting engineer at Digital, says the answer is simple. Local councils should stop waiting for government or some consortium of corporations to do things for them. Instead, they should get off their collective rear ends and take on the responsibility for commissioning a dark fibre loop for their area.

If councillors up and down the land had the wisdom to sanction the funds for such a project, Laing says, they would find their efforts handsomely rewarded, not in heaven but here on Earth. They would find that having a high-bandwidth optical fibre running through and round their town would stimulate business initiatives, ecommerce and home entertainment.

Laing will say all this in a speech at the ScotSoft 98 conference sponsored by the Scottish Software Federation, in Edinburgh on 4 September. His model is Palo Alto, on San Francisco Bay in California, which last year completed a $2 million (#1.2m) 15-mile fibre-optic ring using the city?s conduits.

The Palo Alto experience, says Laing, shows that just as big river junctions spawned new towns in the past, so companies in this age of the Internet will flock to centres that can offer them and their customers high-bandwidth access.

Laing?s credentials as a networking and Internet pioneer are impressive. Formerly the chief technology officer of Digital?s AltaVista software business, he has also been a technical director of Digital OpenVMS engineering, a technical director of Digital engineering in Europe, and was a software strategist in the technology and architecture group of the vendor?s computer systems division.

Laing believes that the Palo Alto experiment has at least three major lessons for regions such as Scotland, whose future prosperity could be vastly enhanced by attracting new-wave technology businesses.

First, it shows that a relatively modest spend ($2 million is not that much in infrastructure terms) is enough to create a dark fibre loop infrastructure.

Second, it demonstrates the importance of separating infrastructure from content provision ? a crucial point in the success of the Palo Alto loop, he argues.

Third, Palo Alto shows that significant access speed advantages can be gained from siting businesses at an Internet exchange, and that businesses will migrate to places offering customers faster web access.

It is important to realise that although the dark fibre loop project was put to the Palo Alto City Council by a Digital engineer, Brian Reid, it was the council that took the ball and ran with it. It commissioned its own utilities company to write the preliminary report, worked out the routing scheme and sorted out the money issues. (You can see the original city manager report to the council at www.city.palo-alto.ca.us/utilities).

None of this was done at a federal government level, and the council never deluded itself that it would make money by trying to turn itself into a media company, a content provider or an ecommerce operation.

What it did hope for was that by taking practical steps to implement the loop, it would attract new businesses to the area and increase the overall prosperity of its district.

Laing argues that the problem with the UK experience to date is that initiatives aimed at upping a particular area?s bandwidth have missed the bus on some stops.

They have been largely consumer-based ? such as BT?s Ipswich trial with video and home shopping ? and have been undertaken by organisations which combined the separate functions of infrastructure provider and content provider.

?By separating these two functions, you automatically enable a wide range of content providers to get involved, which generates healthy competition,? says Laing. He adds that ecommerce should be viewed first and foremost as a business-to-business activity.

?It is a mistake to focus on the consumer aspects of ecommerce,? he says. ?Most purchases in terms of value are between corporations, not individuals. The consumer in the home is not really the model, though the loop also enables high speed direct to home services.?

An important part of a local council-led dark fibre initiative is to provide the basis for a standardised approach to the delivery of services.

This becomes even more important in the light of the many competing access technologies ? from ISDN to cable TV modems to various flavours of digital subscriber line (xDSL) modem technologies. ?My nightmare is that there will be 10 different ways of getting data to and from the home, not one. Everyone will be dissipating their investment activity,? says Laing.

?My concern is that the kind of communications infrastructure we are talking about is already proving to be vital to the future of the economy, wherever this infrastructure is implemented. We need this as much as we need roads and airports, but it is not at all clear this is the way government or regional policy is headed.?

The third point, the importance of the Internet exchange, is key to the communications infrastructure.

Having a so-called city island all nicely wired together with high-bandwidth fibre is one part of the equation. Linking this up to the global Internet in a manner that maximises data flows is the other. ?There is plenty of fibre in the ground already. The trick, when you string it all together into a city loop, is to get the right kind of switching point in place so that it is all going somewhere,? he says.

Here, Laing has in mind Digital?s contribution to the Palo Alto experiment. Digital created a massive junction point, or switching point, linking the loop to the Internet using Gigaswitch/fibre distributed data interface (FDDI) cross-bar technology, with FDDI/Ethernet options for those wishing to connect using Fast Ethernet.

It sited this switching point in a large, three-storey building. The idea was to attract both telcos wholesaling Internet connectivity services and Internet service providers retailing services to both business and the public to co-locate their servers there.

Laing illustrates the advantages of this kind of co-location with what he calls a ?tree and branches? metaphor. By siting your server right at the trunk of the tree, you get lower access latency times, and can therefore provide a better quality of service to your customers than if you locate the server way out on some distant branch.

As with the fibre loop and the city council, Digital is here simply an infrastructure provider. It provides the exchange and the floor space, which it leases, along with all the necessary security. In Palo Alto, the available floor space filled up with 130 different telcos, Internet service providers (ISPs) and content providers in no time at all. Digital is already building additional floor space, says Laing, and that capacity also looks as if it will sell out fast.

Once a complex such as this finds its feet, everyone gains. ISPs have several telcos to choose from to buy their raw longhaul bandwidth. Content providers can choose from a number of ISPs, since the exchange has attracted many large service providers to the site, and end users gain because they get faster access to Web pages hosted at the site.

Local Palo Alto businesses and consumers become big winners in this setup, since they get fibre-based access to content providers and services hosted at the exchange.

On a more technical level, the exchange creates multiple fibre paths, enhancing the overall robustness and security enjoyed by services it hosts.

ISPs also have the ability to set up bilateral peering arrangements with other ISPs at such a site, rather than, or in addition to, switching through the Gigaswitch. At telco-owned exchanges, ISPs pay for a circuit to link their router to another ISP?s router.

Digital says it is a neutral player, letting ISPs set up cross-connects without having to buy a separate circuit to establish router-to- router links.

Congestion problems, which tend to plague telco-owned exchanges, are solved in Palo Alto by the minimum requirement of a T1/DS1 circuit at 1.5Mbs for bridged Ethernet port customers, and T3/DS3 circuits at 45Mbs for FDDI port customers. This ensures that traffic flowing into and out of the 100Mbs FDDI Gigaswitch is appropriately matched with port speed and ISP traffic volume.

Laing says that possessing this kind of bandwidth infrastructure conveys an advantage similar to that enjoyed by, say, a manufacturing zone a few years ago. Having many manufacturers in an area attracts a wide range of service and peripheral industries; he argues that a mega switching exchange will have a similar stimulating effect on a region?s commercial life.

It remains to be seen if a Scottish or Welsh local council would be successful in attracting the likes of Digital to construct a super Internet exchange and server hosting facility to link to any fibre loop initiative they undertake. But Laing maintains that creating the basic infrastructure is half the battle.

If towns would only take the initiative and build fibre loops, Laing says, the Digitals, telcos and service providers would soon beat a path to their door. At the very least, councils could do a lot worse than explore the feasibility.