So, with two major US carriers rolling out fibre to the home, a string of European cities doing the municipal-fibre thing, Iliad fibreing-up their own network in France, and Japan and Korea having long started wiring up whole apartment buildings, how soon will the UK get cracking? Telco 2.0 went to the
Broadband Stakeholder Group’s conference to find out.
Background to the issue
The “broadband incentive problem (PDF)”:http://cfp.mit.edu/events/jan06/presentations/Watlington-Gillett.pdf tells us how there’s little incentive for network owners to invest in networks when they can’t capture much of the incremental value of the traffic. One way out would be to make a radical cut in the underlying incremental costs of bandwidth, and to stretch budgets further. And that’s precisely what we’re seeing all over the world, as operators upgrade in order to substitute new CAPEX for old OPEX.
There are many ways of doing this: deploying fibre, DOCSIS 3 cable systems, and advanced wireless in the access loop; moving to technologies like Carrier Ethernet inside their networks; and substituting peering for transit whereever possible. Mobile operators are increasingly pulling fibre to their cell-sites in order to cope with a rising tide of data traffic encouraged by the arrival of megabit-plus radio links.
Verizon estimates that it saves up to 70% of OPEX on every link it converts to FiOS. So you’d think the pressure would be on to get the fibre out there in Britain, a country criss-crossed with high-maintenance copper in a damp climate. The UK is also perhaps the guinea pig for the broadband incentive problem. But FTTH is further behind in the UK than almost anywhere else in Europe. So far there is literally no SOHO fibre access anywhere in Britain. What’s going on?
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