Fiber-to-the-home conference in Europe right now
This article makes for some interesting reading:
"Fiber To The Home Warms Up in Barcelona"
February 8, 2007
http://optics.org/blog/ftth/
To travel from London to Barcelona this week is to travel from deepest winter to balmy spring, which complements the sunny mood at this, the fourth FTTH Council Europe Conference. With a reputed 1200-plus attendees this is the largest such event, having grown from under 500 visitors in Amsterdam in 2004.
Spanish entertainment The conference is entitled Europe At The Speed of Light, which is rather an optimistic identity when one considers that the FTTH revolution has been scheduled across Europe for at least 10 years. But even if the pace of change is slower than a speeding photon, many people here are quietly confident that the photonic tortoise may yet catch the electronic hare, if one considers the hare to be a ductile reddish metal.
Cheerleading from the speakers aside, the “putting its money where its mouth is” evidence of such optimism is apparent in the complementary exhibition, which features most of the potential suppliers of any such FTTH revolution that might break out sometime soon.
The exhibition – which, it must be said, is always thronging between the equally bustling conference sessions – features 40 companies including Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Nexans, PacketFront and Prysmian (designated “Gold” sponsors), JDSU, Cisco, Draka, 3M (“Silver”) and other hopefuls.
As far as the opportunities for significantly higher sales of optical technologies are concerned it is generally agreed that the necessary laser-based technologies are pretty much already here but, as ever, volumes and price points will be key factors.
Europe’s Growth of FTTH
If he had been asked about fiber to the home in Europe, Confucius may well have said something like “a salesman not selling much has a great opportunity for growth”.
Today we have Hartwig Tauber, the president of the FTTH Council. His wisdom is that Europe’s rate of growth in deploying FTTH is about 30% year on year. “That sounds good, but I want to see it going much faster,“ he said. “The Council has a new mission statement, in which we say we want to see network deployers choosing fiber to the home to give us 10 times the current growth rate.”
“This could equate to Europe having approximately two million fiber connected households in the next three years or so,” Tauber added.
Alcatel-Lucent Targets FTTH
Alcatel-Lucent estimates that Europe has about 150 million households. Jean-Pierre Lartigue, VP marketing and communications at the company’s access networks division and a FTTH Council Europe board member, puts the figures another way. “Currently FTTH reaches less than 1% of European Households but in four years it could be about 6%,” he says, with optimism.
Alcatel-Lucent and Freescale Semiconductor yesterday announced a plan to facilitate the adoption of FTTH technologies by making available jointly developed G-PON (gigabit passive optical network) technology and interoperability specifications to vendors of terminal equipment worldwide.
Through an agreement with Freescale, terminal vendors will be able to license critical technologies for G-PON compliant with Alcatel-Lucent’s established 7342 ISAM “fiber to the user” range of equipment.
Competition to FTTH
It is not as if fiber to the home is marching across the European market without competition. VDSL, which may deliver broadband at as much as 50 Mbit/s, is already established in certain territories, notably Germany, and despite its finite bandwidth, higher electrical power demands and aesthetic drawbacks (unattractive street cabinets, apparently) it is also undergoing development and continues to be widely deployed.
But copper may yet be running out of steam, if that is not a technical impossibility. Wolfgang Fischer of Cisco, another FTTH Europe Council technical representative, drew my attention to a graph published in June last year in the FTTH Worldwide Market & Technology Forecast in June 2006 by Heavy Reading. This plots connection rates (log) against the time period 1990 to 2020 and gives almost exactly an upward, linear relationship, which suggests copper-based communications could become redundant within five years, all other factors being equal.
Fischer said, “A communications equivalent of Moore’s Law [which links computing power with transistor density on a chip] means that today’s typical 1 to 10 Mbit/s broadband definition, depending on where you live, will nudge 100 Mbit/s by 2010, 1Gbit/s by 2015 and 10 Gbit/s by 2020.”
One has to be wary of people brandishing graphs at you, but Fischer is confident that it bodes well for optical solutions providers, like Cisco, although Cisco now buys in its necessary laser technology.
Is Europe Embracing FTTH?
Despite many repeated grumbles about the continent’s apparent indifference to FTTH, voiced by a cross section of Europeans at this Barcelona event – whether suppliers in the exhibition or the president of the FTTH Council Europe Hartwig Tauber himself – there is an undeniable atmosphere of expectation.
Several announcements at the event serve to support the idea that FTTH will progress significantly beyond the current community projects and tentative national-level plans for roll-outs. What do we have and what is in the pipeline? Tauber gave me a thumbnail sketch of some of the busier (and less busy) FTTH territories around the continent.
Sweden: There are many municipalities and especially remote communities relying on FTTH networks - even paying for it and putting it in themselves in some cases. Sweden and other Nordic countries generally have a history and culture of embracing the latest telecoms technologies because of the combination of remote and distant communities and generally prosperous economies.
A fascinating parallel session entitled Case Studies from Round The World featured Hasse “H” Ericsson, md of Sweden’s ByNet, who explained that his company works with many remote communities who literally finance and put in their own FTTH links including digging the trenches. This DIY culture is ultimately empowering these villages and must be a good thing for economic emancipation of the boondocks.
In The Netherlands price and bandwidth competition between fixed networks and cable companies may yet open the door for FTTH with its relatively unlimited bandwidth and oft-touted lower operational costs.
In France, Free announced at the end of 2006 that it plans to deploy new FTTH access nationwide (starting with the Paris area, naturellement). Its aim is replace the ADSL 2+ networks.
Germany: Deutsche Telekom is still very strong and planning to develop VDSL – that is fiber to the kerb. There I apparently a European-level wrangle ongoing between the EC and DT, which wants to have a “regulatory holiday” to release it from the required unbundling obligations. Further pressure to change is likely to come from the impending switchover in Germany (and Austria) from analogue to digital TV.
In Spain – this year’s conference venue, remember – there is apparently increasing pressure from municipalities, regional, city and town councils to the national government demanding an active policy on deploying FTTH to develop the communications infrastructure.
Generally, it is instructive if somewhat galling, to compare the still relatively small scale and sluggish rate of European FTTH development with say Japan, where FTTH customers are signed up at a rate of around 280,000 per month.
FTTH should become policy
Tauber says it is necessary for Europe’s national governments to embrace and push the idea of FTTH. “The situation we have at the moment is what I call ‘missing vision’. People in Asia and North America involved in larger scale FTTH developments are not asking the question ‘will we ever need this bandwidth?’; they are getting on with it. But in Europe, in many cases, the technology drivers are the actual policy makers.”
He adds that one of the many explanations for complacency about FTTH across Europe is regional and national authorities’ misguided satisfaction at having achieved what they regard as significant broadband penetration -- when their definition of broadband is hopelessly low.
“A few years ago in my home state of Nieder Osterreich [an south Austrian region near Vienna] the policy makers responded to public wishes for broadband provision but they decided that broadband meant 384 kbit/s,” he told me. “So now a lot of people in that area have 384 kbit/s but it is not what I would now call broadband, when the South Koreans are defining it as 10 Mbit/s.
“Looking at OECD figures, using this type of standard, means that eight of the world’s top 10 broadband-enabled countries are in Europe. But that would certainly not be true if we used even 5 Mbit/s as a more realistic broadband standard.”
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