Wednesday, March 18, 2009

FTTH snippets from around the world

Several FTTH related news items caught the eye over the past few days. More about the Dutch market in the next few days/weeks, rumour has it. For your diary: Singapore is set to decide on the OpCo of its NGNBN within the next few days; Australia is to pick the winners of its NBN RfP.
  • Green: Verizon FiOS uses just 38% of the energy that its copper network uses.
  • SMP. The proposed KPN/Reggefiber joint venture in the Netherlands is drawing criticism. Both cable operators and unbundlers are preparing legal action. One can only guess what it's about, but I suspect the wholesale tariffs for access to the passive infrastructure are way too high and will be contested.
  • Open access. Bell Canada is fighting it, Ziggo is denying the business case (he prefers a duopoly) for it and TDC Cable will have to allow unbundlers onto its network. The latter case will be interesting to follow, to see if this technically and commercially works.
  • Cable. Kabel Noord, a small MSO (23k subs) in the Netherlands is embracing FTTH for new builds and fully acknowledges the benefits (bandwidth, symmetrical, not just VoD but TVoD as well).
  • Munifiber. Alas, the Palo Alto project fell through. First, Axia's financier quit, and then (when Axia asked the city to pony up the money) Axia itself hung up.
  • M&A. Telefonica supposedly is close to a deal to buy both Hansenet and United Internet. It will be interesting to see how they will fight an incumbent that is equally conservative as the Spanish mothership.
  • In-building. Ericsson has demo'd 500 Mb/s over 500 meters, using 6 bonded pairs. Sounds a lot like solving the in-building problem (for a much faster roll-out).
  • Services. Anderson (Indiana) is contributing a service, as part of the answer to the question: do we need all that bandwidth. It's called storage.
I will be meeting a bunch of fiber people over the next few days, from OBR (munifiber Rotterdam), Reggefiber and PacketFront, so keep posted.

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