City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics
City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics
City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics
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THE LAST MILE 223<br />
<strong>of</strong> 1986 were 1500 homes connected. 30 <strong>The</strong> delays didn’t discourage the<br />
French government, which in November 1982 announced plans to string<br />
fiber to 1.5 million homes in the next five years and expand service to 6<br />
million homes (a third <strong>of</strong> the country) by 1992. 31<br />
Industry observers were unsure what to make <strong>of</strong> Biarritz. France couldn’t<br />
match Japan, the United States, or Britain in high-speed, long-distance systems,<br />
low-loss fibers, and high-performance lasers, 32 but that wasn’t the technology<br />
needed for fiber to the home. French <strong>of</strong>ficials made fiber optics a matter<br />
<strong>of</strong> national pride and invested massive sums in the demonstration, although<br />
today no one I could reach admits to knowing its total cost.<br />
Once the system was installed, television service proved popular, particularly<br />
because Biarritz had poor broadcast reception. As in Elie, users had a<br />
choice <strong>of</strong> several channels, and the switching center routed the chosen channel<br />
to the home in about a second. Voice telephone and videotex signals also<br />
came through the fibers, but they also could have gone through ordinary<br />
phone wires. Video phones sent images in standard television format but were<br />
little used because service was limited to Biarritz. 33<br />
By the time results started coming in from Biarritz, the French government<br />
was committed to launching cable television over fiber, another global first.<br />
Video telephones were discarded; voice and videotex could go over phone<br />
lines. France Telecom kept analog LED transmitters and graded-index fibers,<br />
able to carry only a couple <strong>of</strong> user-selected television channels. <strong>The</strong>y considered<br />
it a first-generation system, and if not as ambitious as Biarritz was when<br />
planned, it was bolder than the rest <strong>of</strong> the world, which had backed away<br />
from fiber to homes after Hi-OVIS and Elie. In 1988, France Telecom contracted<br />
for fiber-based cable systems in about a dozen communities, including<br />
Montpellier, Rennes, Serves, and some districts <strong>of</strong> Paris. <strong>Fiber</strong>s now connect<br />
to some 200,000 homes in those areas and pass another half million who<br />
don’t subscribe to the cable service. 34 You cannot find as many homes connected<br />
to optical fibers in all the rest <strong>of</strong> the world. However, the firstgeneration<br />
system was the last installed in France.<br />
What is the legacy <strong>of</strong> Biarritz? ‘‘Nothing but a technical and economical<br />
disaster,’’ 35 e-mailed a French fiber developer. <strong>The</strong> fibers worked fine in Biarritz,<br />
but the laser transmitters suffered serious noise and reliability problems. 36<br />
That led engineers to shift to LED transmitters for the cable system, but the<br />
LEDs left no room for expansion when customers wanted more channels and<br />
services. For its second-generation systems, France Telecom used single-mode<br />
fiber ‘‘trunks’’ to carry an array <strong>of</strong> many signals to neighborhood nodes but<br />
distributed signals to homes through coaxial cables. It’s an approach now<br />
used in many other countries. <strong>The</strong> original fiber lines work, but they are<br />
technological orphans, incompatible with anything else anywhere else in the<br />
world. <strong>The</strong>y can be upgraded only with new transmitters and special equipment.<br />
37 <strong>The</strong> Biarritz system itself is gone; France Telecom stopped the experiment<br />
in early 1990, dismantled the network, and pulled the fiber cables from<br />
underground ducts.