Back from BBWF

Broadband World Forum was pretty cool, but the last few weeks have been taxing and I'm knackered. I'm looking forward to a relaxing week-end so here are just a few bullet points of feedback, comments and general trivia:

anticipating the likely recession (actually, it's been confirmed that France is in recession today), there was a lot of "sweat your copper asset" technology at the show. VDSL of course, but also bonded copper and such. My take is fiber will continue to happen in countries where it's already begun, you might have to wait a bit longer than expected elsewhere.

an interesting trend, especially amongst the "little guys" is how opex is increasingly being considered when designing products. FibroLan's layer 2 fiber management systems and Genexis and Packetfront's modular FTU/CPEs spring to mind.

Cisco has sponsored a very interesting study about Broadband Quality that I'll be talking more about next week (give me some time to digest the results) Let's just say that it sheds new light on real international rankings.

Brussels is a gorgeous city, especially with a ray of sunshine, beer is abundant and succulent. I hadn't had a carbonade in ten years, and I still love it.

Murmured rumours suggested that Ericsson's announcement that they were working on Belgacom's FTTH pilot may have been premature. Further rumours suggested that Belgacom was slightly miffed about the gaffe. Seems you don't have to be Sarah Palin to utter those (although the debate last night was dissapointingly gaffe-less...)

Thomson's next generation of Smartvision features a seriously cool IPTV GUI. Not only does it look gorgeous but it's cleverly designed to allow customer profiling and consequent push of live and VoD programmes. Not quite Tivo clever, but not far. It also demonstrates how advertising could be used by SPs in a not too intrusive manner and features convergence heavily.

The PON vs P2P religious war seems to have abated a little. The usual suspects are firmly camped in their positions but defend it with more rational arguments that what I've heard in the past...