Recession helps the telecom industry mature. Consolidation was inevitable and the recession was the finger that finally pulled the trigger on companies that had been struggling for some time. However, for hellas online things look more optimistic than ever. The client acquisition rate is among the highest in the Greek market and our network is expanding agressively towards the countryside. Our national DWDM network is being put into service and its techonology will allow us for multiple 10GbE shared among built-in L2 switches.

The Greek broadband scene was certainly shaken on Feb. 5th by the announcement of the Greek Minister of Transport & Communication, Mr. Kostis Hatzidakis, claiming that Greece will invest 2,5 billion Euros in fibre-networks. In a country where national roads have not yet been completed and people lose their lives on the road every weekend, this might not strike as the next most important thing to do. However, it is a positive motivation for telcos to start thinking about what's next. The impact of this act was obvious by the huge greek attendance at the FTTH conference in Paris. Greeks were all over the place, discussing about the announcement and trying to find how real this claim was. But enhtusiasm fell short two months later when in an FTTH conference in Greece (organized by AIT with all the greek providers) the climate was obviously discouraging. Everybody saw obstacles in the road towards FTTH and no company had made plans for it.

My belief is that sooner or later the global wireline business will be forced towards FTTH when the mobile companies start gaining broadband share (with the so much anticipated 3G services). Mobile broadband will be a personal service (and there are now devices proper for it - see iPhone, Blackberry, coming Android devices) whereas wireline will have to turn into a household service (TV, Surveillance, VoIP, wifi 802.11n). If there is by then a proper framework set by the goverment, such that infrastructure won't be replicated and fiber can be laid deep into the grounds (today we typically have 2 fiber cuts per month, thing which never happens with copper networks) then we can all hope for a more broadband future!

As for hellas online, we shall be ready! ;)

We've been too busy over these past months trying to expand our network towards the rest of Greece. This is what I 've been up to.

December started with invited talks in two FTTH (Fiber to the Home) conferences where I had the chance to present hellas online's view on the future of FTTH. Hellas online has been actively researching FTTH over the past year, evaluating the two competing FTTH architectures (GPON, Point-to-Point), scanning all the range of active equipment and looking for techniques and passive elements that one has to use in this new fiber infrastructure. We have also learned a lot so far from conferences that we visited all over the world (incl. the world FTTH conference in Orlando) and from case studies by various telecom operators across Europe.

These two talks in Copenhagen and Amsterdam gave me the opportunity to express publicly our conclusions on how FTTH could fit in the greek reality and get some useful feedback. It seems that FTTH is not merely a matter of choosing the proper equipment and therefore determining the cost but it is very highly correlated to the strategy of the company and therefore the anticipated revenue streams. Incumbents across Europe follow a different strategy focusing on GPON equipment whereas alternative providers follow a mixed strategy depending on their penetration rates and their agreements with the municipalities. You can take a look at the topics of my speeches right below:

FTTx Conference, Copenhagen 27-28 November "Build It And They Will Come": Does It Make Sense To Deploy An FTTx Network Without A Clear Usage Scenario? What Is All This Bandwidth For?

GPON Deployment Forum, Amsterdam 3-6 December Case Study: Identifying The Economic And Technical Drivers For Deploying Ethernet P2P For FTTH Evaluating the cost of deploying Ethernet P2P for FTTH according to hellas online’s FTTH projects Examining the role of other technologies such as VDSL2 and WiMAX: what is different in Greece? Assessing the extent to which fibre management and power consumption are limitations for P2P networks in mass market deployments: Which markets should a provider initially target for P2P FTTH?

On the other side, I am working on the expansion of the DWDM network across Greece and this seems challenging since up until now we were implementing ring or linear topologies but now techonology allows us to design full mesh topologies where lambda services reach destinations by optically bypassing intermmediate nodes. It is also now possible to have Layer 2 capabilities in the optical transportation and only Layer 3 needs to remain centralized. Prof. Chan's views on Layer 3 interacting with Layer 1 once seemed prophetic but day by day I can see this coming and leading to optical transport equipment with Layer 3 capabilities in the future. From there on, it is a matter of optimizing the layers within the same piece of equipment.

After months of designing, ordering and supervising the deployment, the WDM systems are now up and running. All of the local exchange offices are connected to our data centers and the company is expanding its activities outside Athens.

The core optical network consists of a CISCO DWDM system with 32 wavelengths at 10Gb/s using path and double home protection. This DWDM system will guarantee lots of bandwidth for the years to come.

This my MIT webpage which I will try to update as frequently as my work responsiblities allow.

I find myself currently in Athens, Greece designing optical networks for one of the oldest ISPs, hellas online.

Along with the new management team, we hope that HOL will be turned into the leading service provider in Greece. Therefore we do not anticipate a career change any time soon ..