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Home fibre plans survive downturn

The benefits of fibre to the home go beyond speed

More than two million people in Europe now have fibre broadband direct to their home, suggests a survey.

The latest figures on superfast broadband delivered by fibre to the home (FTTH) shows 18% growth over the last survey compiled in late 2008.

The continued growth suggests that the global economic downturn has not hit plans to build a fibre infrastructure.

Sweden tops the list of nations rolling out the technology, with 10.9% of its broadband customers using fibre.

Karel Helsen, president of Europe's Fibre-To-The-Home Council, said the growth matched predictions that were revised when the credit crunch started to make itself felt.


TOP FIBRE NATIONS
1) Sweden - 10.9%
2) Norway - 10.2%
3) Slovenia - 8.9%
4) Andorra - 6.6%
5) Denmark- 5.7%
6) Iceland - 5.6%
7) Lithuania - 3.3%
8) Netherlands - 2.5%
9) Slovakia - 2.5%
10) Finland - 2.4%

"The numbers in 2009 are in line with the latest forecasts," said Mr Helsen.

By 2012, the FTTH Council expects that 13 million people across 35 European nations will have their broadband delivered by fibre. Such services would start at speeds of 100 megabits per second (mbps), said Mr Helsen.

Around Europe more than 233 projects were underway to lay the fibres that would connect homes or buildings to the net, said Mr Helsen. Many of those, he said, were being operated by local governments or smaller net firms.

Local governments were interested in FTTH because of the economic and social benefits it brought in its wake, said Mr Helsen.

The low latency or delay inherent in high-speed fibre networks made possible novel uses of broadband, he said.

"No delay is very important," he said, "specifically if you talk about applications that are time dependent such as personal communications, conference calls or video calls where delays cause a lot of interference."

While early FTTH services were concentrated in cities, said Mr Helsen, many more were reaching out to rural areas for e-health and e-learning projects.

Separate studies show that an FTTH infrastructure can have a direct impact on local economic output, said Mr Helsen.

The UK, France and Germany have yet to break into the list of top ten FTTH nations.

UK homes to get super-fast fibre

Source: BBC News


Laying fibre in sewers saves costly and disruptive road digging
The UK's first "fibre town" could go online in the autumn, delivering speeds of about 100Mbps (megabits per second) to consumers' homes.

Fibre firm H2O provides super-fast broadband via the sewers and either Bournemouth, Northampton or Dundee will be offered the service first.

It will compete with more established companies, such as Virgin Media, which is speeding up its cable network.

It follows government concerns that the UK is not embracing next-gen broadband.

Transforming services?

While other countries' plans for next generation broadband - offering speeds of up to 100Mbps - are well advanced, the UK has slipped down the speed league tables.

For consumers, super-fast net connections could create a range of new applications including on-demand high definition (HD) TV, DVD quality film downloads in minutes, online video messaging, CCTV home surveillance and HD gaming services.

Last month BT announced that its own fibre to the home trial at Ebbsfleet in Kent would see the first homes connected by August of this year.

But this will initially be limited to around 600 new houses. The development will eventually have some 10,000 homes connected via fibre with speeds of up to 100Mbps but the project will take until 2020 to complete.

We are talking here about fibre speed; not that dreaded word broadband
Elfed Thomas, H20

Future broadband technologies
While BT has pledged to provide all new housing estates in the UK with fibre connections it has not yet made clear its plans for existing homes.

The current telecommunications system was never designed to carry data and many have called for an urgent fibre upgrade.

BT has argued that with costs of up to £15bn to roll out such a network it needs to be convinced of demand and have assurances from the government that it will be able to recoup its investment.

At the end of last year, Virgin Media announced that it would be upgrading its entire cable network - which covers half of UK homes - to provide speeds of up to 50Mbps (megabits per second) and this is expected to begin towards the end of this year and be completed in 2009.

London-based firm Geo, which also offers fibre via the sewers, serves mainly businesses but also leases its fibre to consumer providers such as Tiscali and Carphone Warehouse.

Broadband caution

Antony Walker, head of the UK's Broadband Stakeholder's Group, cautioned that the H20 scheme could not create a fibred Britain alone.

"There are clearly benefits to using the sewers and this fibre deployment is good news but it is only a small piece of the jigsaw," he said.

The burgeoning fibre market is going to be a tough one for providers, according to Ian Fogg, an analyst with JupiterResearch.

"An optimistic view is that they will need penetration rates of between 15 and 20% of households in a particular area and with so many providers offering services that makes the business case very challenging," he said.

Mr Thomas of H2O is confident that its mega-fast service will have instant appeal for consumers and is pleased to be the first to offer such high speeds.

"We are talking here about fibre speed; not that dreaded word broadband," he said.

The service will be delivered to individual homes via a four-inch box attached to the house.

It will also serve local businesses and council services.

Bournemouth, Northampton and Dundee have been selected because H20 has already installed its fibre service to local council buildings.

The fact that the sewer-based fibre takes advantage of existing ducting means there is no need for expensive and disruptive road digging, making the system faster and cheaper to deliver.

"While deploying traditional fibre over a two-kilometre area would be six to 12 months in the planning. We can do it in four hours," said Mr Thomas.

Mr Thomas said the sewers solution was a lot cheaper than the conventional route of digging up roads.

"An average town of 75,000 homes would cost someone deploying traditional fibre between £50m and £70m. We can do it for 20 to 30% of that," said Mr Thomas.

H20 said it is in "advanced talks" with media partners and internet service providers who will offer the service to consumers. The first of these partners is due to be announced next month.

Roll-out in the chosen town will begin in September and take 18 months to complete.

Mr Thomas hopes to add another 14 towns over the next five years.

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FttH by FranceTelecom (french)

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Chelan County's Washington State

Learn how local residents and businesses in this Washington State community are benefiting from a new fiber-to-the-home network.

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FTTH Council's Joe Savage Interviewed on Rocketboom

Rocketboom is a daily, three-minute videoblog covering technology and culture. Joe Savage discusses the basics of fiber-to-the-home in his interview with Rocketboom's Joanne Colan.

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BT to Launch 100 Mbps FTTH Greenfield in Kent

BT’s local access network business announced a greenfield FTTH deployment scheduled for this August in Ebbsfleet Valley in Kent.

The deployment will encompass Land Securities’ 1,000 acre new build project with approximately 10,000 new homes planned.











BT plans to offer data speeds of up to 100 Mbps, enabling multiple HDTV channels to be watched simultaneously, HDTV gaming, and near instant music downloads.













Openreach will offer all its products on a wholesale basis to all UK communication providers allowing for competition at a retail level.

BT already provides some 120,000 businesses across the country with fiber connections.

BT said it is also committed to increasing broadband speeds over copper, introducing services of up to 24 Mbps from Spring 2008.

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2Wire Connects the Home

Source: LightReading

2Wire Inc. is looking to extend its reach into consumer living rooms with new networked media products it expects service providers will deploy en masse.

With its 2Wire intelligent home server and the 2Wire Shifter, the company says it allows end users to reach the content they want anytime, anywhere. At the same time, the products give service providers more control over multimedia connectivity as a managed service.

The intelligent home server combines network-attached storage with media server functionality to create a central repository of networked content. The home server hunts content on networked devices, building categorized libraries that are stored off-site and can be accessed from any networked device.

The 2Wire Shifter, true to its name, lets users remotely access the content that comes in through the set-top box or other networked devices.

Both products enable Web-based control through telco-run portal sites.

Companies like Sling Media Inc. have sold and marketed these ideas directly to consumers for some time. But 2Wire expects that its offering will take off due to service providers' interest in being a more active part of user's home multimedia experiences.

"Service providers haven't been playing in the backup solution space because they didn't know where they fit," says Jaime Fink, 2Wire's VP of technology and strategy.

Fink says his company's service provider customers were looking to deploy something that gave them more visibility into home networks and would possibly get consumers to sign up for even more managed services.

"Service providers don't want to put a product in the house that is the same as consumer products available that frankly aren't selling that well," Fink says.

That has led to a disconnect between what is available in the retail market and what service providers want out of a multimedia storage offering. "About 85 percent of [service provider customers] have come hunting us down saying, 'We need a product that will help us take control of media in the home and offer managed services,' " he says.

2Wire will be showing off the new products at CES, and they will be available in volume in the latter half of the year. According to Fink, the company already has customer commitments for the products, which will lead to some fully launched services by the third quarter of 2008.

Is the Internet ready for the next generation of web video and robust web applications?

Is the Internet ready for the next generation of web video and robust web applications? Fiber to the Home Council presents this educational video.

Broadband Forecast: 2008 To 2013

Western European Residential Broadband Forecast: 2008 To 2013

Source: Forrester

There is still huge potential for growth in Western European residential broadband adoption, despite a slowdown in the majority of national markets. Forrester sees 44% household penetration at the end of 2007 and forecasts a rise to 71% by the end of 2013. By then, any remaining dial-up services will be marginalized — 98% of online access will be via broadband. New access technologies, including WiMAX and fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), will become more prominent, growing from 2% of all broadband households in 2008 to 8% in 2013. However, contentious business cases that undermine the existing industry hype around them will limit their adoption unless governments intervene. Our forecast reveals that European ISPs will sign up 48 million Net connections between 2008 and 2013, but sobering churn figures will offset that opportunity. As the pace of adoption varies across countries, the level of churn in Western Europe will grow from 23% in 2008 to 26% by 2013, increasing retention costs for ISPs.

Fiber To The Home Reaches 2 Million

Source: Mike Sachoff

Around 2.1 million U.S. households, or close to 2 percent, have fiber optic connections to the Internet, according to a study sponsored by the Fiber-to-the-Home Council and Telecommunications Industry Association and conducted by RVA Market Research.

That is an increase from 1 million households with fiber optic Internet connections in September 2006.

"Clearly, American consumers want what only fiber can deliver, and that is a pipe big enough to handle the high-bandwidth Internet and video applications of the future," said Joe Savage, president of the FTTH Council.

About 1 million U.S. households receive video over fiber-to-the-home, an increase of 160 percent over the past six months.

"While annual growth in the number of connections has doubled for the past two years, we expect to see a further increase in the growth rate as more high-bandwidth applications come to market and as more major service providers begin offering fiber to the home," said Michael Render of RVA Market

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Fiber develops, slowly but surely...

The variables controlling the deployment of wired telecommunications infrastructure to businesses and homes are cost, throughput and, ultimately, best guesses on demand. The candidates are fiber, coaxial cable and copper, which is putting up a good fight before being relegated to the dust bin of telecom history.

There are lots of shades of gray among those simple options. AT&T, for instance, stops fiber in the street and uses DSL-enhanced copper to serve small groups of homes. Verizon’s FiOS, meanwhile, brings fiber right to the premises. That’s a more expensive approach, since each home must be provisioned with gear to convert the signals from light to electricity.

One of the key variables in determining what works and what doesn’t is the density of users. The story can be very different in suburban, exurban and rural areas. In rural areas, demand is driven by the need to attract and keep businesses, the relative ease of deployment and, in many cases, a lack of competition.

In Clarksville, Tenn., the energy utility expects to flip the switch next month on a system that will provide video, voice and data services to about 50,000 residences and 5,000 businesses. This Telephony story says this will make it one of the largest municipal fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) builds in the country. Utilities getting into the telecom game have an ulterior motive: A big driver is eliminating costly meter reading. One thousand customers now are connected, with the balance to be hooked up in a year and a half.

The US$55 million project works out to US$1,000 for each premises passed by the fiber. The utility will use equipment from World Wide Packets to offer symmetrical 10 Mbps Internet access, VoIP, digital television (200 channels), high-definition television (16 channels) and video-on-demand. Clarksville appears to have more competition than many rural areas: Charter Communications and AT&T both have a presence.

Fiber seems to be progressing in fits and starts around the globe. Fatpipe looks at the UK market, where regulators and the major carrier, BT, are working through issues centering on the uncertainty about the eventual use of the broadband network. The heart of the piece, though, is a Yankee Group graphic detailing the ways in which consumers reach the Internet in different regions of the world. Cable modems lead in North America and Latin America and DSL in China and India. Fiber is highest in China, where it only has 6.81 percent of the connections.

This post by Om Malik at GigaOm was written in anticipation of a FTTH conference in mid autumn. Products to be introduced at the conference — from Corning and Neophotonics — aim to reduce the cost of FTTH. The comments go off in a decidedly different direction: The respondents get into a debate over the need for the great capacity FTTH will provide. The feeling is that the capacity is not needed now, but valuable applications demanding such bandwidth won’t be developed if such expansive amounts of capacity aren’t made available.

AT&T said this week it is kicking in another US$500 million to its hybrid fiber/DSL U-Verse initiative. That follows an investment of $1.4 billion in late spring. That, according to xchange, puts spending for this year and next between $4.5 and $5 billion. In addition to the extra cash, the company is cutting its homes passed figure from 18 million to 17 million for the year.

A look inside the numbers suggests that increased spending and reduced footprint expansion may actually be good news from fiber proponents’ point of view. The changes seem to reflect an emphasis on the area controlled by recently acquired BellSouth. The story says it had been unclear how the telco would provide services in these areas, and an option was via satellite. The move is suggestive of startup costs, and implies that AT&T feels confident enough about fiber to roll it out in rural areas of which it originally may have been unsure.

There are a variety of ways in which fiber can be leveraged. Ethernet passive optical networks (EPONs) will predominate early in the near future, according to ABI Research. The study says active Ethernet (AE) will gain market share over the forecast period against EPON, broadband passive optical networks (BPONs) and Gigabit passive optical networks (GPONs).

Even in Holland the growth increases.
Amsterdam CV (GNA) started the roll out of its FftH (Fiber from the Home) network in October to about 40,000 adresses in Amsterdam. The shareholders of GNA are the commercial daughters of five Amsterdam housing corporations (33%), investors (33%) and the City of Amsterdam. The building of the network through an European tender has been awarded to by a consortium of BAM/Draka/Van den Berg. BBned, a subsidiary of Telecom Italia won the European selection on the investment and operation as a wholesaler of the active layer of the network.

The nature of the telecommunications infrastructure is fascinating because it involves several variables that all constantly change. However, the biggest variable, demand, seems certain to grow.

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