MälarEnergi and PacketFront join forces - deliver cutting-edge FTTH  to Västerås

Since it started operating Västerås's urban network a little over three years ago, Mälarenergi Stadsnät has become known for its innovative thinking. The company's model to create volume in the network before the laying of the cables has been decided has proved a success, and soon its vision of the virtual society, where "everyone has access to everything and everyone - at high speed, at all times", will be a reality. Numerous other Swedish towns have adopted the model and many are also being helped by Mälarenergi Stadsnät to develop their own urban networks. PacketFront has developed its solution alongside Mälarenergi Stadsnät's advancements, and the two companies have now formed a proper partnership to build tomorrow's digital communication channels together.

In 2000, Västerås was the first municipality in Sweden to form its own commercial company to build and operate an open urban network, and since then the company, Mälarenergi Stadsnät AB, has deregulated the broadband market by allowing the users themselves to decide which services they want. Mälarenergi Stadsnät has, in turn, connected commercial properties, local and county councils and households. The Västerås network today covers the entire town and functions as "a town within the town".

With its 22,000 household connections, Mälarenergi is already a large player on the urban network market. It also has 1,700 companies, all the local state-run schools, council offices, companies and all of the Västmanland county council healthcare clinics. In 2007, when the current expansion project in Västerås is finally completed and Byggnads AB Mimer, the town's council-owned housing company, has its 13,000 apartments hooked up to the network, it will comprise no less than 50,000 connected households.

The Västerås model

Mälarenergi Stadsnät connects properties and service providers to the urban network. The users in companies, organisations and private households are, in turn, linked to the urban network via their landlord's property net. Tenants' associations and housing associations can also build property nets and hook themselves up.

	Robert Kjellberg, Managing Director of Mälarenergi Stadsnät AB, Västerås

Once the property is connected, the companies, organisations and households are free to link up. This usually takes place with the user paying a fixed monthly fee for the use of the network via the service provider(s) chosen. The Västerås model is an organisational concept that helps provide structure and facilitates sales, contract-signing, start ups and contact with the service supplier.

Mälarenergi Stadsnät's business model has been well received by most operators, including Tele2 and Tiscali. The model is based on a system whereby the network owner and the service providers share the revenue generated by the urban network, with the service providers offering their services direct to the users instead of running their own broadband connections to the customers they want. The service providers pay for gaining access to customers who are already connected to the network.

The user chooses from a range of services

The users hook up to the system via a normal wall data socket and then buy the services they themselves want direct from the relevant providers, thus gaining access to Internet, email, music, films or whatever they so wish.

Västerås's urban network offers more than 50 services suited to different categories of user, such as landlords, companies or households, including alarms, surveillance, support and operation, training etc. All those who want to can also offer a service on the urban network, in which case they sign a supplier's contract with Mälarenergi.

Around 70% of all network communication is local and need not go via the Internet. It is much quicker to transfer a file between two connections in the urban network than to send it over the Internet, and the capacity thus saved can be used for much more bandwidth hungry traffic, such as video-on-demand, IP telephony, TV or radio, which are transmitted with much poorer quality on the Internet.

Users wanting to use the Internet also benefit from being connected to the urban network since the network is itself connected to the Internet via the Internet operators that offer their services on it.

The Västerås urban network offers connections at speeds no less than 10 Mbit/s, but the network has a transfer capacity of between 100 and 1,000 Mbit/s. Compared with the national backbone net in Sweden, which when completed in 2005 will offer a capacity of 5 Mbit/s, the Västerås network is exceedingly powerful.

Technology provided by PacketFront

At the time when Mälarenergi was formed, its corporate mindset was so new in the world of networking that it turned out that there was not a single company able to offer both the technologies and the products needed. That is to say until PacketFront arrived on the scene. Since then, the two companies have followed each other's development. It soon transpired that PacketFront had produced unconventional technologies and products that suited Mälarenergi's needs regarding data transfer.

The partnership between PacketFront and Mälarenergi began in February 2003 with Mälarenergi incorporating PacketFront's ASR 4000 broadband routers and BECS™ control and provisioning system into all their new installations. Mälarenergi will eventually be replacing its existing equipment so that in the future it will have only one system, regardless of access technology (fibre, cat 5, VDSL or ADSL), in its network.

PacketFront is, of course, pleased to be collaborating with such a well reputed company as Mälarenergi Stadsnät:

"Mälarenergi Stadsnät is known for being at the cutting edge of urban network building in the same way that we are known for being at the vanguard of broadband solutions," says Martin Thunman, CEO of PacketFront. "We provide the technical platform and a depth of experience, and together we will now be testing and creating new purpose-built solutions for tomorrow's broadband networks."