"PacketFront's products carry the people of Helsingborg into the future"

Tomorrow's broadband is being built in Helsingborg. In having the municipally owned energy company Öresundskraft build one of the country's few genuinely open, operator-independent network, the city's companies, households, authorities, associations, organisations etc. gain access to high-speed data transfer.

The broadband network is in a constant state of development. Öresundskraft is the owner, manger and builder of the network, and in order to meet future needs, it has decided to support its system with PacketFont's BECS™ control and provisioning system and its purpose-built broadband routers.

Believes in the virtual meeting place

It is, of course, hard to imagine what tomorrow's society will look and function like, but at Öresundskraft they believe that technical developments will entail access to - and a demand for - a great many services, meeting places and other technical "innovations", both for companies and private individuals. Öresundskraft is therefore investing in the "City within a city" portal, where virtual meetings between schools, the council, industry, organisations, and associations on the one hand and national and global service provides on the other can create a wide range of products and services that embody diversity, freedom of choice, and openness.

The conceptual basis of the business model is an open broadband network for which users buy an "entrance ticket" and then choose freely between different services and bandwidths available. And the most interesting feature of this model for the end-users is that they only pay for the actual hook-up. The different service providers then make and follow up the customer contacts and in so doing can maintain their customer relations.

Helsingborg's city network is based on "true" fibre-optic broadband with transfer speeds of at least 10 Mb/second. This is a very high-speed transfer rate, which can also handle huge volumes of data. In order to achieve maximum network capacity, Öresundskraft has now updated its network with PacketFront's central administrative systems, BECS™ and SMT, which enable it to handle traffic using a range of different access technologies for the end customer simultaneously.

Öresundskraft has already linked up around a hundred corporate subscribers, and new customers are arriving all the time. The goal for 2005 is to have some 1,000 corporate customers.

A contract with Öresundskraft gives access to the actual network. Öresundskraft then connects properties and service providers to the city network. Connections are then distributed to the tenants through the property network, and the tenants buy the services they want themselves from the service providers. The customers can also choose freely between the different service providers that offer network content. This could of course be the Internet, but also TV, firewalls, server operation or business systems - to name but a few. It is this solution that makes the network "operator independent".

The first phase of the expansion programme was begun in 2001 in the centre of Helsingborg and other office-dense areas of the city. There are currently also contracts with ten different providers offering Internet access, operation and business systems. Öresundskraft also operates approximately 200 connections for the municipality and in order to grow even further on the private market is investing heavily in increasing the number of household customers. This is where PacketFront's products come in.

The advantages of PacketFront's products

Öresundskraft have, then, decided to invest in PacketFront's central management systems, BECS and SMT. Peter Löfling, PacketFront's customer relations manager, explains what this means in practice:

"BECS is a central software package for the network that controls our routers. The software handles the customers' services and allocates each service an individual bandwidth. These two things in combination mean that an entire network can be administrated with minimal resources, while the network handles both advanced and bandwidth-demanding services, such as IP telephony and TV."

At first, Öresundskraft's customers were requesting Internet access. But Öresundskraft's level 3 network makes it possible to operate traffic between customers without having to go out on the Internet. This is something that Öresundskraft's competitors cannot offer, and is an area in which Diedrik Fälth sees a new pattern emerging: the tendency for companies that are already connected to use the network as the quickest way to transfer information to another company, another office, etc.

"This might be, say, communication between printers and advertising agencies, or between the city's greengrocer wholesalers and the traders," says Fälth, product manager for Öresundkraft's city network in Helsingborg.

Quotes from Diedrik Fälth, Product Manager for Öresundskraft's City Network in Helsingborg:

	Diedrik Fälth Product Manager

"We chose PacketFront's solutions and products because they're equipped for tomorrow's broadband market, a market we now intend to take over," says product manager for Öresundskraft's city network in Helsingborg.

"We also chose PacketFront because its BECS system can handle the administrative requirements that we believe will arise in the future. It's also important for us to have a system that's designed for future services, such as IP TV."

Quotes from Niklas Pettersson, Chief Technical Officer for Öresundskrafts City Network in Helsingborg: 

"PacketFront's products suit us because they're hard-wearing and 'intelligent'," says Niklas Pettersson, chief technical officer for Öresundskraft's city network in Helsingborg.

"PacketFront's administrative system, BECS, simplifies the entire customer process and is therefore both practical and cost-effective. The same applies to replacing equipment. If a PacketFront machine breaks down, we simply swap it for a new one, which downloads its configuration from the server. This means we don't have to send out costly technicians and we save both time and money."