Cisco's Video-Comms, FT's NRA Z0 and is VDSL NGA ?

I'm still struggling for time and I still haven't managed to write my new year blog post. That's when I'm glad I'm French, we have until January 31st to do that in France!

Meanwhile, a few tidbits of information:

The day after I posted about Skype embedding their client on selected HDTVs, Cisco made its big announcement on the same topic. They are - to my knowledge - the first vendor to offer a comprehensive solution to telcos for end-user video-telephony. I look forward to learning more about the specifics of the offering in the coming days. I'm thrilled by the possibility and skeptical that telcos will market it properly... Trials have been announced with Verizon and France Telecom.

Said France Telecom has been slapped in the face by the competition authorities in France for its NRA Z0 plans. NRA Z0 was a form of local government financed sub-loop unbundling for ADSL. The competition authorities stated that it would recreate a de-facto monopoly (since other telcos would have to reinvest in popping the sub-cabinets with no economies of scale). Meanwhile, tech bloggers are warning regional authorities to beware of FT's attempt to upgrade its network on their money. Note also that this seems to highlight a shift of authority from the regulator to the competition authorities when it comes to dealing with FT's potential abuses.

On a side note, I'm hearing some rumours that regulation at the European level is looking at VDSL and might exclude that from an NGA definition. I think that would paint the whole technology with too broad a brush, but I might see excluding FTTC/FTTN from an NGA definition. I published a paper last year on this which analysed the various technology solutions for wireline network upgrades and concluded that FTTC/N carried along a lot of the legacy issues of ADSL... I'll be interested to see how the axe falls (if at all) considering all the talk we're hearing about DSM and such... If you have any more intel on this, I'm interested!