Convergence Conversation

In a speech yesterday, EU commissioner for information society Neelie Kroes announced some new proposals to boost investment in Next-Generation Networks. The plan in a nutshell stands in three bullet points:

• force a reduction in copper wholesale prices to diminish the profitability of copper vs. fiber

• reward copper to fiber switchover by granting higher copper wholesale prices to incumbents who do switchover

• inject €6.4bn of public funds

What the plan tries to do really is to reduce what the commission perceives as an excessive gap in short-term profitability between copper and fiber. More...

BBWF Europe next week will clearly be about copper. Virtually every vendor or PR agency that contacted me wanted to brief me on VDSL, vectoring, bonding and all that jazz. Just this morning, Alcatel-Lucent announced their big push in this direction (see Alcatel-Lucent accelerates the availability of superfast broadband.) My coverage of these technologies on fiberevolution in the past might have seemed somewhat simplistic, and it may have come accross as me disagreeing with them without nuance. That's actually not where I think their role is. 

Broad FTTH deployment is a long-term endeavour. More...

I have been known to say that regulation is often wrongly blamed for delays in FTTP deployments. What many players (especially incumbents) mean when they bemoan "regulatory uncertainty" is "unfavourable regulation".

In this instance though, it looks at first glance as if regulation is indeed to blame. For a number of years now, Swiss incumbent Swisscom has been signing deals with municipal energy companies to deploy FTTH. The model is quite novel, with the incumbent deploying 4 strands of fiber into each home, 1 for its own use, 1 for the use of the energy partner and 2 for wholesale. More...

• There are some who understand that the WiFi genie is well and truly out of the bottle, and that (perhaps grudgingly) users need to be given tools to set their own preferences and policies, and that the operator's / network's role is in helping make the telco-preferred WiFi easier and safer to use, when that's appropriate.