Monday at Westminster - I popped across to the Houses of Parliament on Monday evening for a discussion on Next Generation Networks.

Panelists included Amy Chalfen (BT Openreach), Kip Meek (Chairman, Broadband Stakeholders Group), Katie Miller (Head of Government Affairs, Europe, Nortel) and Alex Blowers from OFCOM. The meeting with chaired by Malcolm Harbour MEP.

I've not been closely involved in broadband infrastructure technologies for 7 or 8 years and it was very interesting to get a view on the current and future state of the 'industry'. Much of the debate focused on the nature of fiber infrastructure that would be required to support technology demand in the UK (looking as far out as the next 30 years). The immediacy of bandwidth requirements for 2012 was discussed, although proposed solutions seemed scarce. Areas which I find interesting in the overall debate:

1. The required topology - i.e. do we run fiber to the home, to the cabinet, where are access points presented, and at what point can we 'un-bundle' (on the final point there are some very interesting technologies emerging in terms of de-multiplexing)
2. How providers will differentiate services
3. What stake government and regulators require to insure provision of this critical national infrastructure along with access points for service providers
4. What creative solutions exist for both provision of services and provision of what is highly expensive infrastructure

Fiber to the home provides immense possibility for services growth. The cost considerations are equally immense and trying to steer a path through the disruption and economic and regulatory challenges ahead will be complex. It is really interesting to ponder how the nature of the Internet will change when bandwidth limitations are diminished. The fiber backbone is of course a key enabler, but Internet evolution will also need to be considered to ensure 'its infrastructure and standards' can cope with the new upstream speeds and the increasing volume of 'high quality' content that will be pushed to Internet servers.

As something of an 'old-fashioned' engineer, I also (slightly puritanically) feel that scarcity drives innovation (look at all of the developments in compression technology to deal with current limitations). Constraints aren't always a bad thing, as they force us to look harder at the problem and try to drive maximum value from every component.

I suppose the place to get started in terms of delivering fiber is to work this into new housing development builds, perhaps as a regulatory mandate. [Circumference of a Moose]