Extending Europe’s broadband

 

Leading broadband players unite to form industry body.

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Leading broadband players of Europe (telecoms companies, ISPs, technology vendors and academic institutes) have come together to form the MUSE project in an effort to accelerate the rollout of the next generation of broadband services.

EU-funded, MUSE (Multi-Service Access Everywhere) has €60 million to look into every aspect of broadband access technology, such as architectures, access and edge nodes, DSL, fibre optic, fixed wireless, back-end integration, interconnection between public networks and home networks, and generic test suites.

“There is often misunderstanding; people think we were just looking at improving the access bit-rate, but that aspect of the project accounted for only 20 per cent of our budget. The main challenge was to enable multi-service delivery through an integrated end-to-end approach,” explained MUSE project coordinator, Peter Vetter.

The MUSE project has been broken down into two phases: phase one, which ended February 2006, focussed on the technical architecture for next-generation broadband networks; while phase two is currently looking at upgrading this architecture with network intelligence to facilitate the support of fixed-mobile convergence, multimedia and IPTV, or television transmitted via the internet, among others.

Vetter says the group has concluded on optical fibre as the solution for Europe’s broadband future. He said: “Eventually all networks, including cable networks, will evolve to optical fibre - that will be the standard physical technology. And it is already happening: fibre is deployed in France, Sweden and other countries. But in the meantime, the most widespread technologies, DSL and fixed wireless, can move to GSB.”

The fundamental architecture is in place with MUSE phase I finished in February 2006. Now phase II has started with the intention of developing the enhanced services enabled by the GSB architecture.

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