A small village built by war veterans and their families in the 1940s brought home the European Broadband Award 2017. The prize was awarded by three European Commissioners jointly, at a European Union conference and ceremony on 20-21 November. The ”Helsinki Optical Fibre Cooperative” had entered into one of five competition categories, ”Openness and competition”. This was the first time that a Finnish communications network scored the top position.
The broadband network reaches out to most of the almost two hundred family houses in the Marttila Village.
The EU aim is that ”by 2020, all Union citizens have access to much higher internet speeds of above 30 Mbps and 50 % or more Union households subscribe to internet connections above 100 Mbps.” In Marttila we have already come much further.
The large majority of the 100 plus mainly single family houses in Marttila are connected through a fast and high capacity optical fiber network. It offers symmetric speeds between 100 Mbit/s to 1 Gbit/s. Even higher speeds are possible, and have been tested.
To choose optical fiber instead of relying on wireless connections through one or another of the big telecom operators was clear for us from the beginning. As the mobile phone networks get increasingly congested, which is already happening here in Helsinki at times, connections slow down and become much less reliable.
The connection that I use now is through Telia and gives me speeds clearly above the 100 Mbit/s. The upload speeds that always tend to be much lower are identical to downloads which is a major benefit. Optical fiber is the only sustainable solution that carries far into the foreseeable future.
We also wanted to own and control our own communications. Therefore our cooperative brings four fibers to each home instead of the single one that operator-owned and managed nets do. Multiple telecom operators, large and small, compete and sell their internet services directly to our members using our network.
One of the reasons that we started to build ourselves was the lack of interest by both public and private operators. Government focus is on rural areas and they clearly want urban regions to be built up by commercial actors. The commercial telecom operators are not interested in neighbourhoods like ours which from their point of view are too sparsely populated .
Our village network is the first of its kind in an urban area. It has already inspired followers and other cooperatives have been formed in different parts of the country. We have proved that not only big multinational businesses can build and own communications networks, but also grass-root users themselves.
Of course we were lucky to have some really skilled villagers who were committed to managing and implementing the project with us others. There was a great amount of unpaid voluntary work that made this network accessible for residents. It has contributed much also to the togetherness across the many generations who live in this green oasis in the middle of a large metropolitan area – well it is much more snow-white in the winter…
Jan Furstenborg, member of the Helsinki Optical Fibre Cooperative Board.