FTTH in Maresme: a strong relationship

FTTH is an essential infrastructure for Broadband Society and cloud journalism. The Maresme county has a privileged situation in Catalonia: its situation near Barcelona, one of the main communications hub in Spain, along with the particular orography of a region located between the Mediterranean coast and the Litoral Mountain Range, has ensured a broadband evolution worthy of analysis. Particularly, this paper, in collaboration with Marc García Domènech will follow the progressive and treacherous implementation of FTTH technology in this coastal area.

Fiber To The Home (FTTH), in 2022, has become one of the most demanded broadband technologies in our society, linked to 5G and thinking on 6G in 2030. Fiber optics allows providing great speed to consumers who may live relatively far away from the main broadband backbones, as the speed loss becomes minimal. 

Despite its usefulness, FTTH requires a great capital investment from broadband companies, a key factor to explain its late apparition in Spain. However, once this technology became available, it spread very quickly, even during the late economic recession years. As the Comisión Nacional de los Mercados y la Competencia (CNMC) examined, FTTH implementation in Spain was scarce, but its growth patron was to double itself every year: from being the less used broadband technology in 2009, it quickly gained widespread use through the years until 2015, when FTTH became even more used than HFC by 640.000 lines.

According to the same exams, FTTH in Spain had become in just three years the most used broadband technology, even surpassing xDSL. In fact, in November 2021 the FTTH lines in Spain were 12,6 million. As of August 2019 there were 9,8 million FTTH lines in Spain, being Movistar (formerly Telefónica, a public-operated monopolistic telecommunications company) the main provider by operating a 39,88% of the established lines. Despite that, independent private providers such as Orange and Vodafone are relevant as well, with a 26,22% and a 20,91% of the current FTTH market respectively. These extensive updates have shown progress, as Spain had an average download speed of 122.71 Mbps at the end of 2019, making it the 14th fastest downloading country in the world, surpassing technological giants like China, Japan or Finland.

Maresme’s County Council foresaw this success and usability back in 2011, when the institution launched a two phase plan to transform Maresme into an interconnected county with the latest technology available, mainly FTTH. The project, called Broadband County Network of Maresme (XCBAM), was aimed to provide these services in the first place to the town halls and government institutions, and in second term upgrade the infrastructure to open it to the whole private market. Furthermore, this progressive liberalization of the network was planned to be developed at the same time as another two step implementation: the first wave of FTTH infraestructures would be built in the largest city centres; not only Mataró, Maresme’s capital, but also in Calella, Vilassar de Mar or El Masnou, to name a few examples.

List of villages included in the first phase of the XCBAM project. Source: Maresme County Council

After completing phase 1, the 11 remaining municipalities of Maresme would receive either FTTH or WiMax infraestructures, depending on the amount of possible consumers and especially the location of the village, as certain towns such as Sant Cebrià de Vallalta or Cabrils are placed in mountainous areas that make the establishment of an FTTH network difficult and expensive.

List of villages included in the second phase of the XCBAM project. Source: Maresme County Council

The main goal of the project was transcending the “Smart City” concept and take it to the next level: having the local administrations of each town and village interconnected makes the concept of “Smart County” a reality. Moreover, the connection between Maresme’s infrastructure and Catalonia`s Open Network would integrate not only Mataró, which would serve as a convergence point for the wire infrastructure, but the whole county in a digital superstructure that efficiently communicates Catalonia almost entirely thanks to the most advanced broadband systems.

But the private sector went faster than the public administration: Telefónica took the lead and by the end of 2014 had already received the necessary concessions to build an FTTH infrastructure that covered many of the cities included in the XCBAM plan. On the 12th October 2015, the  Maresme County Council stopped the project after having provided FTTH connection to the 19 city centres of the first phase of the XCBAM plan: proceeding to the second phase would have meant an additional monetary investment that, at the moment, the Council couldn’t afford, and that would have been redundant due to the private companies’ speedy effort to provide connectivity to most of the county. Following the C-32 road, which flows concurrently the Maresme’s coast next to the train railroads, Telefónica continued building FTTH infraestructures across the county.

One of the villages that had to wait until this company established the FTTH network was Sant Vicenç de Montalt. This village that shortly surpasses 6.000 inhabitants was scheduled to be connected to the XCBAM in the second phase of the project. The village is divided in two: one half is easily accessible, as it is located in the coast and the C-32 road and the train railroad cross this part of the village, making it very accessible for the FTTH infrastructure and other communication systems. On the other hand, the other half of the village is located in the mountains, making the establishment of a complex technological infrastructure like FTTH an expensive stunt, if not a challenge.

Despite that, the local council began preparing the arrival of fiber optics as soon as 2012, shortly after the announcement of XCBAM. While FTTH is nowadays a reality in the entire village, it was Telefónica who built the infrastructure, and not the County Council as expected.   Despite that, the fiber optics wiring isn’t complete yet: at the beginning of 2019, there still were areas of the village where FTTH coverage was deficient or nonexistent.

However, this doesn’t mean that Sant Vicenç is disconnected from the world on the slightest. As early as 2014 the local council launched SantVi-Wifi, a public wireless internet hotspot located in the Avinguda Toni Sors (one of the most crowded streets in the village, on the mountain part), the beach and the Germans Gabrielistes park, located between the coastal and mountain parts of the town. This system exists thanks to the installation of a series of WiMax antennas in key points across the village, such as the top of the town hall or the top of the before mentioned park’s tower. These antennas also empower the broadband received by the video surveillance cameras located across the village, a system that will be explained afterwards in this paper. The surplus broadband that the antennas provide was scheduled to be auctioned to private companies with the goal of compensating the slow ADSL speeds that citizens received at the time, which could be lower than 500 Kbps.  

Even before that, the local council built a system of video surveillance across the village. These 22 cameras, erected in 2012, combine WiMax and fiber optics to provide real time data to the local police station, where a database compiles every car plate and vehicle image to share it with other law enforcing forces if required. The video surveillance system also helps policemen at monitoring what happens across Sant Vicenç and intervene if necessary, in cases such as robberies, fights or reckless driving. However, the at the time mayor and president of the Maresme County Council, Miquel Àngel Martínez, stated that felonies in Sant Vicenç weren’t frequent, and that the camera system was aimed at prevention rather than active crime fighting. As of 2018, 65 cameras are currently in service in Sant Vicenç.

All in all,  FTTH technology in the Maresme county has has a treacherous evolution and implementation, but over the years has been successfully implemented in diverse areas of citizens’ everyday life, even in rural and orographically challenging areas like Sant Vicenç de Montalt.  Even in 2020, 8 years after FTTH was scheduled to take the county by storm, there’s still work to do: the Maresme County Council has made an agreement with Catalonia’s government (Generalitat) to resume the public fiber optics project, which is scheduled to cover every village in Maresme by the end of 2020. Thus, most of Maresme’s citizens will soon enjoy the advantages of living in a Smart County, a ground-breaking concept in Spain, Europe and the world. 

We analyze broadband and HbbTV evolution (here, the case of Maresme) in this blog, in Research Group about Digital Journalism and Marketing and Broadband and in Research Group on Innovative Monetization Systems of Digital Journalism, Marketing and Tourism (SIMPED), from CECABLE,  Escola Universitària Mediterrani of UdG, UPF and Blanquerna-URL, in Twitter (@CECABLEresearch), Google+, in the group of LinkedIn, in the page of LinkedIn, in the group of Facebook, in Instagram (CECABLE), in Pinterest and in this blog. We will go in deep in the DMTforum-XXVI Cable and Broadband Catalonia Congress (19 May 2022, Barcelona).