Free: point optical fibre in France

In short, 60% of the French will have the fiber by 2022 and the remaining 40% will have to be jointly covered in collaboration with local authorities, ARCEP and the set of French operators.

The Convention Free 2012 in the presence of Maxime Lombardini held this weekend, it was question of the development of the fixed and mobile operator as well as the future of new technologies that will be used. Including, a good part of the agreement was the subject of the deployment of fiber optics at the national level.

The recent echoes on the subject seem not really good, and its Director General said while that Free is not only facing this problem of deployment of fiber in France and that other operators are in the same case. However, he qualifies that things are still progressing and that it can announce that almost all of Paris is fiber to the horizontal. For memory, the deployment of the fiber must be two axes. Horizontal, first to connect the heart of operator's network and buildings and vertical then to mount the fibre in each apartment and Pavilion. According Free, there still thousands of fibres to Paris to get a blanket full, but the harder remains to be done by the operator.

All operators abound in the same direction and indicate that they have many difficulties to get fiber in French homes. Mis en cause, the Trustees of building agreements or local communities which slow to give their agreements or who are too hesitant in the light of work by operators. According to figures reported by UniversFreebox, with an investment of€ 600 million by the troublemaker of the French Internet, it hopes that all its subscribers spend the FTTH (Fiber To The Home) at least in the capital by the end of next year. To facilitate the appointment of laying of fibre and making terminal optical (BTEP) in the apartments of Paris and other cities soon, Free will implement an approach simplified directly by the subscriber interface Freebox.

Outside the dense zones, which concentrate much of the French population, investments for fibre deployment will be jointly undertaken much orange at 80% and the rest by Free, and SFR. Thus, Free hopes to achieve the objective of 60% of the population covered by the optical fiber by 2022, dense and moderately dense areas would be affected. For the remaining 40%, Free plans to work with local communities to find a common solution to bring fibre to the pavilions. Because if non-dense areas represent only 40%, the profitability is lower for the operator.

It appears also that local authorities propose to fiber according to their own solutions, which complicates interoperability with operator and plans to ask the ARCEP to justify this practice. But in the end, who will pay the Bill in these non-dense areas? Local and regional authorities under the auspices of imposed regulations? The owners of the lodges wishing to pass the very high speed?

Holey Optochip: the optical chip from IBM

Data transfer will be by fibre optics, IBM confirmed us!

Optical processors, or simply optical chips, it is neither the first nor the last time that we will hear speak. To summarize, researchers are trying to break out of the transfer of information about copper tracks that travel our maps mothers and other electronic cards to drastically increase the bandwidth. To achieve fiber pathway is preferred because it allows to benefit from the speed of light that physically provides information at speeds of almost unlimited transfer speeds, once used electronics following. On this point, IBM researchers appear to have taken a new step forward.

IBM introduced its Holey Optochip chips with 24 holes for the reception of the signal light and 24 other holes for the issue of information by optical fibre. The transfer rate would be of the order of 1 Tb/s... for a short distance, of course. The consumption of such chip does not exceed 5 Watts, this could be interesting for future major centres of calculations or data centers.

IBM said its show of force that the manufacture of the chip does not use new technologies or methods of complex manufacturing, but components today classics on the market, making it so cheap to produce.

Optical receptors on the two rows of top and bottom transmitters.

For researchers, the problem of bandwidth between the components of a computer is then more a problem with this type of optical chips. For them, the bottleneck is now moved to bandwidth network, even if the optical fiber in data-center is widely used. He would then produce optical chips more efficient to propel the light signals over a greater distance, increasing the speed of transfer between components and units of calculation then mechanically.

We hope now that this type of demonstration are not made only to show the power and the level of research in the laboratories of IBM, but that this could lead to actual use in our future computers. Finally, this is not to immediately...