Residents of Milan or Stockholm can be forgiven for wondering what the expression "world wide wait" means, as they surf the internet. They have 10 megabit (million bit) per second internet connections, delivered by Ethernet over an optical fibre direct to their apartment. The same fibre also brings them cable television, video on demand and voice.

Ethernet, a local-area network (LAN) architecture developed in 1976 by Xerox in co-operation with DEC and Intel, is a mature, pervasive and cheap technology that is very easy to implement and available in all regions of the world with the same standard.

Mark de Simone, European vice president for technology solutions at Cisco, the networking company, points out that it is not only an access technology, but an end-to-end delivery vehicle.

"It is a major technology, not just in the enterprise, but in backbones and metros," he says. "It allows a whole of rich layer of content and video services to be delivered from one end to another."

If a broadband network was to be built from scratch, Ethernet over fibre would be the obvious choice. Already, it is being deployed in new housing developments in North America and elsewhere. It costs $1,000-2,000 per home to deliver, but fibre allows operators to offer consumers a "triple play" of television, telephony and internet access. Most subscribers are paying a total of between $100 and $150 a month for these services, which is sufficient to pay back the original costs in developments of 5,000 residences or more.

"Greenfield sites are attractive because the operator expects to sign up most of the homes as soon as they are built," says Dave Waks, a partner in Systems Dynamics, an industry analyst*. "There are nearly 100 such developments in North America. It is much less attractive for existing developments, because the telephone companies already have 100 per cent of the customers and the cable operators have 70 per cent of them."

The economics of laying fibre require a fairly high penetration rate for all three services. Bernard Daines, an Ethernet pioneer and founder of Worldwide Packets, which makes transmitting and receiving equipment for Ethernet to the home, reports that traditional marketing is resulting in about 30 per cent take up. However, when college students with laptops computers go round the residences to demonstrate the services, they are getting 70 per cent take-up rates.

Mr Waks has a vision for broadband access that suggests that 100mbps is the "magic number" that represents enough bandwidth to meet foreseeable future requirements. He bases this on a household having a simultaneous requirement for several channels of high definition television at 20mbps per channel and several standard definition channels at 4-8mbps each. This would leave enough for digital radio and other audio and whatever is left can be used for data.

Ethernet is already delivering 100mbps over fibre in Milan and elsewhere, but Mr Waks believes that enlightened public policy to encourage take-up is required to make it more widely available. The Swedish government has such an approach, and Bredbandsbolaget (B2), the Swedish broadband communications company, has 70,000 subscribers in 36 cities.

"We are building the largest IP network for residential users in Europe and maybe the world," says Jan Morten Ruud, chief executive of B2. "Ethernet in the first mile [the equivalent of the "last mile," from a customer's perspective] technology is allowing us to compete effectively against incumbents like Telia."

Some communities are already taking matters into their own hands and rolling out a broadband infrastructure, especially if they are dissatisfied with their existing services. Grant County in the centre of Washington state is a rural community of 40,000 homes and farms which have no digital subscriber lines (DSL) or cable television.

Mr Wacs is closely watching a pilot in 70 homes in Palo Alto, in the centre of California's Silicon Valley, because if they decide to adopt Ethernet over fibre a lot of other communities might follow.

"Cities or counties can put in fibre and equipment just as they might build a road or a sewer," says Mr Daines. "They are not in the business of providing service, so they throw it open to any internet service provider, cable television operator or telephone company."

He points out that a lot of economic development, job growth and innovation is done in smaller locations. Civic leaders are therefore motivated to keep the businesses they have and attract new businesses. "The internet is now connecting enterprise data together from large and small businesses," he says. "As doing business electronically becomes more and more prevalent, the requirement to have enough speed to be competitive becomes stronger."

Although most Ethernet is being delivered over fibre, there is a firm proposal for it to work over existing "twisted pair" copper connections using very high data rate digital subscriber line (VDSL). However, it works only over short range and telecommunications operators have a heavy investment in asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) equipment. Solutions are also being developed for Ethernet to be delivered over existing television cables.

Both these approaches are attractive because they use existing infrastructure. However, neither can match the bandwidth of fibre. "We are starting to see legacy environments pushed to their limits by the applications that people want to run over them," says Dan Riordan, vice president of segment marketing at Extreme Networks, an equipment supplier. "Once people are forced to go to a higher bandwidth, then Ethernet becomes a very real option."

Whereas some doubt the business case for broadband, Guido Garrone, director of operations for FastWeb, which has 40,000 subscribers in Milan, reports that the high speed internet connection was originally attractive to consumers. However, video-on-demand soon became the most appealing service. "Users can pull the video content they want when they want it," he says. "They have the power to set up the programming they need."

Clearly, Ethernet over fibre is a proven and attractive broadband access technology. However, the costs means that for some time it will be restricted to large greenfield sites, poorly-served densely populated areas or where it is adopted as a matter of public policy. If wired and wireless home networking takes off, it becomes even more of an end-to-end solution.

However, it will not break out of the niche until the telecommunications and cable operators invest in it, but they have no funds for investment at this stage. * Mr Waks is co-editor, with Sandy Teger, of the Broadband Home Report, a free newsletter available from www.broadbandhomecentral.com