Today, broadband services do not reach smallest Italian towns, because providers do not find a remunerative market for their projects. Government intervention is the only way to fill the gap between industrialized cities and smallest towns.

Tuscany and Siena district are the best example of this situation. In This region, economy is based on a small number of large companies and a large number of small and smaller local industries with high level products and worldwide distribution.

Those industries’ IT investments are not compatible with providers offer, for the high cost of telecommunications as Italy come from a period of monopolistic situation in IT market.

Today companies as Terrecablate provides a solution for this problem building an infrastructure, used also form providers (with a fee payment) , opening everywhere in the region the distribution of broadband services.

Terre Cablate wants to build the broadband network for the Public Administration, Productive Activities and SOHO users in Siena province.

This ambitious goal can be achieved only with a

• Clear project idea

• Basic and elastic organization

• Funds

Last point is the most critic: it is difficult to have a government structure able to administrate taxes with the purposes to increase the quality of life in your district. This is the case of Siena with the Monte dei Paschi Foundation. This structure manage yearly an amount of euro to be invested in projects whose purpose must be the increments of the economic activity in the region.

was presented to the Province President and to the Major of Siena and the final common idea was to give to Siena all the possibilities that will be reported in this document.

Structure

This network structure do not adopt the ultimate fashion in transport technology but, moneys must be spent only on a consolidate structure, able to provide all possible types of services and links with the maximum of availability. SDH structure is the most used and tested among providers who wants to give, not only data link services or alchemistic Voip solution, but provide primarily a high quality Voice and Data services. Those types of services must be offered with a real business quality and large possibilities of choosing in connection technology. This must be achieved without force a unique solution offered to the user or suffer for Latency and Quality of Service limits of an IP structure.

• SDH solution is the best way to solve the problem of the backbone rings.

• SDH is the full transparent solution and has been adopted to transport old and new types of protocols as:

• "new" Gigabit structure

• dedicated links among Customer PBX

• All possible termination Protocol that a User may require as: ATM,FR,GBE,CDN and so on

The adopted solution must be seen from the point of view of the large availability of fiber and bandwidth. Terre cablate maintains the ownership of the whole amount of fiber in the project so cost doesn’t limits the bandwidth use and a TDM solution is possible where it is the simplest to manage.

A strange idea is thinking to create a structure that is able to maintain and to build a so large fiber network without take into account the possibilities of skills offered in Siena Province.

For this reason the investments was used to create a project maintaining the control of Bandwidth management. Besides, pipes construction, come from a synergy with local companies involved in Gas and Water distribution and management ( Intesa and Gestione Val di Chiana).

This synergy give the possibility to have the best project and information useful to dig the ground and create the fiber road. Those companies have a capillary structure totally in touch with all types of users in the province since they provide the most important commodities. So Invoicing, users requirements, digging maps, are under full control and the projects avoid creating technologically beautiful TLC structure but useless to provide required services.

Terre Cablate is a Consortium of all the Towns of Siena district, and all other companies involved in the projects have more or less the same structure.

Distribution

Many Fiber networks arise in many countries, managed from many providers, but one of the most important problems for the success of the service is to find a good solution for LAST MILE.

As you can see in the picture before, last mile, in this network, involves three types of users:

• Industrial Areas

• Public Offices

• Home and small Offices.

The first two points will be achieved with an FTTH (Fiber to the Home) solution; fibers will be delivered to Municipal Buildings and to Industrial Zone until users.

Last mile for SOHO will adopt a solution known as HFC technology.

This kind of solution is able to deliver approximately 50 TV Broadcast Channels carried in the fiber from the unique Head end.

As HFC is an analog structure, it does not map on SDH so it will be delivered to the nodes via a parallel fiber structure on the network.

This solution has important features:

• Downstream bandwidth between 54 – 40 MHZ is used to deliver max 50 analog TV channels and the bandwidth between 470 – 862 for digital channels and data link

• Analog service does not require maintenance of equipment for sampling and codifying the signal to force it on complex GBE/IP media. The offered TV service has the same quality as satellite TV broadcast available today.

• Media used for distribution is the same today available in every HOME: coax TV Cable, so no extra charge must be take into account for UTP cabling

• A defined bandwidth is available on the same media ( cable) to deliver data traffic as:

• Internet

• VOIP

• Interactive TV

• Pay TV

• Telecontrol and so on

With Terre Cablate and Intesa Sponsor, a SET TOP BOX is under construction to guarantee those possibilities:

• 50 channel broadcast TV and local cable TV

• Connection to Internet on TV set via HFC

• Voip connection to home equipment for a No Cost ONNET and low cost OFFNET voice traffic.

• Pay TV with delivering on request of entertainment to the Top Box

• Remote management of GAS , WATER billing , service and consumption control

• In addition, all the many other services you may imagine.

Basic Information

To create the whole project it use four external Consultant:

• Renzo Farina as coordination and digging projects

• Renato Ambrosio for HFC and SDH project

• Sergio Pistolesi for Phone structure service, billing and data service

• Tommaso Mirante. for switching and service network

The whole project will have an estimated cost of 80 millions of Euro.