International specialists are fascinated by the special story of how Romanians got ultra-fast internet. “It’s a success of the people, of those who made the neighborhood networks”, say the specialists from Europe. With a postmodern leap, despite a lack of copper cable networks, Romanians deployed community networks everywhere that today are the seed of the Internet.
Internet cablesPhoto: Lola García-Ajofrin/ El Confidencial
- As part of the European project PULSE, HotNews.ro together with partners from El Confidencial and EFSYN, two of the largest publications in Spain and Greece, analyzed how Romania managed to register this success and what went wrong in other countries. The article was written by Sebastian Pricop (HotNews.ro/Romania), Lola García-Ajofrín (El Confidencial/Spain) and Kostas Zafeiropoulos (EFSYN/Greece)
“Today, people living in Bucharest, Romania, have much faster internet access than most people in the US. This is unacceptable and must change,” exclaimed US Senator Bernie Sanders, then a candidate for the US presidency in internal Democratic elections, on https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/705171336381923328in 2016.
Although it was interpreted by some Romanians as an insult to Romania, being categorized as a “third world” country that cannot be ahead of the USA in a ranking, it was also a moment that put Romania in the media’s attention in the category success stories.
96% of households have access to “fibre”
What most Romanians don’t know is that, for them, music and movies can be downloaded faster than for other Europeans. Romania is one of the countries in the world with the fastest internet and the fastest in the EU.
Today, 96% of Romanian households have access to FTTP (fibre) coverage, well above the EU average of 56%, according to data from the European Commission’s Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI). Spain (91%) and Portugal (90.8%) follow it in the ranking. Last on the list for fiber access are Greece (27.85%), Germany (19.32%) and Belgium (17.16%).
Graphic: Ana Somavilla (El Confidencial)
Romania (23.35%) is among the top three European countries in terms of broadband internet of at least 1GB in homes, after France (39.34%) and Hungary (29.81%). In the netindex.com ranking, Bucharest is in seventh place, after New York.
How did Romania succeed? A victory for the entrepreneurship of ordinary people
Jorge Pérez Martínez, professor at the Higher Technical School of Telecommunications Engineers at the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM), explains that in the early 2000s, Romania had an outdated telephone infrastructure that could not support high-speed Internet connections; “There was no network of copper cables, only in cities and in very bad conditions,” he explains in the dialogue with El Confidencial.
What happened then was that “they started to make a living”, continues the professor, and instead of doing as in other eastern countries, “where they set up an operator based on the existing state company”, in Romania, “people started deploying networks.”
“When I say people, I mean simple people,” emphasizes the professor, “one by one.”
Lacking copper networks, the Romanians managed to install neighborhood networks. They began to be woven on the roofs of houses in cities: webs of cables that wrap around poles and street lights.
Neighborhood networks
And since they were starting from scratch, they weren’t going to implement copper, “so they implemented coaxial cable – the television cable – or, mostly, fiber,” explains Pérez Martínez. Those neighborhood networks were the seed of a fast internet that began to spread throughout Romania.
While underground infrastructure was expensive and required approval, construction and maintenance, neighborhood overhead networks required only one man. So, “because of beneficial abandonment”, those networks have proliferated throughout Romania, writes William Rinehart, senior researcher at the Center for Growth and Opportunity in Utah.
And when the commercial Internet began to take hold, those local providers took advantage. For their part, in the absence of a strong phone market, instead of using phone services for an ADSL connection, “Romanians jumped straight to fiber through these neighborhood networks.”
“There were no regulations or laws regarding the construction or operation of these networks, so they were able to develop quickly,” adds Andrei Ioniță, technology director of the non-governmental organization Code for Romania/Commit Global.
And those neighborhood networks started at the bottom and grew as word spread from person to person. “In some cases, several networks ended up being interconnected, creating some of the first semi-metropolitan networks in the country,” explains Ioniță.
The Romanian model failed in Spain
Professor Pérez Martínez says something similar happened in Spain, “although not as big” and “with a very tough competition system”. There were even some innovators who rolled out their networks, but it didn’t work in Spain because it was an alternative that came at a price that you could hire a big operator for.
Easy access to fast internet has helped not only ordinary citizens, but also small Romanian entrepreneurs. The entrepreneur David Burcovschi, a former student of the Informatics High School in Iasi who entered IT entrepreneurship right from school, remembers that in 2012 and 2013 he himself installed a network in his municipality, with 15 or 16 clients.
“I didn’t make a lot of money, but it kept the network running and covered my internet bill,” he says.
Burcovschi explains that many digital product companies have developed in Romania since then.
Good for business, bad for the face of the towns
Also, one of the reasons why Western companies outsource to Romania is the fact that “the prices were very competitive”.
But how did they get so many users? Because it was very cheap, says Professor Pérez Martínez. And, this can be done, he says, in a system of brutal competition without “a history”, where they were able to create a new infrastructure without any condition to deploy it even on facades and pillars.
What was a success for business has mutilated the face of cities and was “a disaster, yes, from an environmental point of view”, agrees Pérez Martínez.
In recent years, interest in community networks has grown as an alternative model to bridge the connectivity gap in the face of the limitations of conventional commercial telecommunications. National operators are expected to connect between 60% and 70% of the world’s population by 2025, far short of universal connectivity by 2030, one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
The United Nations Refugee Agency defends the potential of this model for displaced populations. A 2018 Association for Progressive Communications (APC) investigation of 16 initiatives in the Global South found that, in addition to affordability and access, these types of networks boosted local economic development and community empowerment.
Germany does not know what to do with copper networks
Paradoxically, the countries with the best infrastructure of classic copper telephone lines are now facing problems. This is the case of Germany, which today does not know what to do with the network, explains Burcovschi.
Despite the widespread deployment of fibre, progress towards the end of copper networks has been slow in Europe, explains the study ‘Closing copper networks. European experience and practical considerations’ from the German consulting firm WIK.
In December 2019, Orange France announced that it would replace its entire copper network by 2030. In Spain, the shutdown of the copper cable network will take place on April 19. Germany still does not have a date for the closure.
Internet in Greece, slow and expensive
Greece is one of the countries in Europe with the slowest and most expensive internet, say the partners from the Greek publication EFSYN. This problem was mainly generated by the lack of competition in infrastructure development.
“The country lags behind the EU average in terms of very high capacity fixed network coverage (28% versus 73%),” according to DESI. Only 19.8% of Greek households have access to fast internet and reliable services, according to the Hellenic Statistics Authority (ELSTAT), and almost no Greek households (0.2%) have access to a speed of 500Mbps/1Gbps.
This is because fiber optic penetration, which the Greeks later arrived at, is virtually non-existent (less than 1%). “Obviously we have been slower, but we are speeding up,” says a spokesman for Greece’s National Post and Telecommunications Commission.
For Harris Georgiou, the general secretary of the Greek IT Association, however, “it’s not just the speed of the connection that matters, but also the quality of the connection.” “They’re just advertising more speed, but that doesn’t make sense if I’m getting 60 disconnects an hour, which is very common.”
Georgiu believes that fiber alone does not solve the problem, because “the majority [grecilor] they still have outdated equipment”.
The good news is that Greece performed much better in mobile and 5G connectivity (86%), above 81% in the EU.
Where did Romania fall behind?
However, even though Romania has very high fiber connectivity, in terms of infrastructure, it still has challenges ahead. This is the case of 5G coverage, where with 82.41% Romania is somewhat below the EU average (86.53%), in a list where Ireland (98.39%), Denmark (97%) and Finland (96, 25%), according to DESI data for 2023.
Romania also lags behind in terms of e-commerce in the EU (7.6%), even ahead of Greece (7.3%).
- This article was produced as part of the PULSE project, a European initiative to promote cross-border journalistic partnerships, funded by the European Commission. HotNews.ro collaborates in the project with other prestigious publications from Europe including Gazeta Wyborcza (Poland), Der Standard- Austria, El Confidencial- Spain, Il Sole 24- Italy, Delfi- Lithuania, Denik Referendum- Czech Republic, EFSYN- Greece, HVG- Hungary, Mediapool- Bulgaria.
