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Razmišljanje nekega nizozemskega novinarja.
Fibre or not to fibre to my home
It was a long, long time ago when cable came first to my home. KTA, the Amsterdam city net, was a revelation: the number of channels I could receive tripled – from the two national Dutch public channels to no less than six channels – one from Belgium and three from Germany.
Hard to imagine nowadays that this was an exciting moment in the life of a TV viewer, but those were the days.
Just last week, the company laying down the fibre optic cables in my neighbourhood was digging up the pavement. But there was not the excitement I felt when the Amsterdam cable network reached my home. At the moment, I am an UPC customer with dozens of channels, HD, catch-up TV, VOD and not to mention fast broadband access thanks to DOCSIS 3.0. And I have even more TV channels, SD, HD and even 3D, with my satellite dishes pointed at Astra and Eutelsat birds.
The question now is – do I really need more than this? In terms of television choice, there is already more than I can cope with. Faster broadband speed? How much Mbps does a family need? Watching an HD on demand movie? Downloading a game or playing a multi player online game? It’s all easily done – simultaneously – using the old coax cable. Uploading videos to YouTube? Sending a heavy PDF file? It’s all done in seconds.
Of course, in the future, we will all be connected via glass fibre – but at the moment it seems like a super highway with just motorbikes driving on it. The search is on for the killer apps on fibre, but so far none has been found. Yes, there is tele-medicine, home security systems, 2-way video chat in HD – but all these can easily be done on the existing infrastructures.