City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

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of 1986 were 1500 homes connected. 30 The delays didn’t discourage the
French government, which in November 1982 announced plans to string
fiber to 1.5 million homes in the next five years and expand service to 6
million homes (a third of the country) by 1992. 31
Industry observers were unsure what to make of Biarritz. France couldn’t
match Japan, the United States, or Britain in high-speed, long-distance systems,
low-loss fibers, and high-performance lasers, 32 but that wasn’t the technology
needed for fiber to the home. French officials made fiber optics a matter
of national pride and invested massive sums in the demonstration, although
today no one I could reach admits to knowing its total cost.
Once the system was installed, television service proved popular, particularly
because Biarritz had poor broadcast reception. As in Elie, users had a
choice of several channels, and the switching center routed the chosen channel
to the home in about a second. Voice telephone and videotex signals also
came through the fibers, but they also could have gone through ordinary
phone wires. Video phones sent images in standard television format but were
little used because service was limited to Biarritz. 33
By the time results started coming in from Biarritz, the French government
was committed to launching cable television over fiber, another global first.
Video telephones were discarded; voice and videotex could go over phone
lines. France Telecom kept analog LED transmitters and graded-index fibers,
able to carry only a couple of user-selected television channels. They considered
it a first-generation system, and if not as ambitious as Biarritz was when
planned, it was bolder than the rest of the world, which had backed away
from fiber to homes after Hi-OVIS and Elie. In 1988, France Telecom contracted
for fiber-based cable systems in about a dozen communities, including
Montpellier, Rennes, Serves, and some districts of Paris. Fibers now connect
to some 200,000 homes in those areas and pass another half million who
don’t subscribe to the cable service. 34 You cannot find as many homes connected
to optical fibers in all the rest of the world. However, the firstgeneration
system was the last installed in France.
What is the legacy of Biarritz? ‘‘Nothing but a technical and economical
disaster,’’ 35 e-mailed a French fiber developer. The fibers worked fine in Biarritz,
but the laser transmitters suffered serious noise and reliability problems. 36
That led engineers to shift to LED transmitters for the cable system, but the
LEDs left no room for expansion when customers wanted more channels and
services. For its second-generation systems, France Telecom used single-mode
fiber ‘‘trunks’’ to carry an array of many signals to neighborhood nodes but
distributed signals to homes through coaxial cables. It’s an approach now
used in many other countries. The original fiber lines work, but they are
technological orphans, incompatible with anything else anywhere else in the
world. They can be upgraded only with new transmitters and special equipment.
37 The Biarritz system itself is gone; France Telecom stopped the experiment
in early 1990, dismantled the network, and pulled the fiber cables from
underground ducts.