Friday, November 19, 2010

Telco 2.0: FT World Telecoms: Broadband & Fibre

BT CEO Ian Livingston makes an interesting point that successful high-bandwidth, fixed-line broadband network deployment.

Deployments seem to involve either massive investment by government (as in Sweden or now Australia), toleration of an incumbent monopoly (as in Japan), or unusually favourable circumstances such as extremely high urban density, or to put it another way, extremely low trench mileage per subscriber passed (as in Hong Kong or Singapore).

One suspects that list of strategies will be longer in the future. It is possible that a sort of "hybrid"model could develop in the United Kingdom and some other markets, where there is a single facilities-based wholesaler, but also relatively easy ways to create new facilities-based access drops that use the single distribution network.

In principle, that might have advantages if one thinks about a neighborhood optical access terminal representing the aggregation point to the backbone network, and then multiple providers compete to supply the "access" or "drop" connection.

In the United States, competition is more likely to continue to take the form of a landline duopoly and a few wireless broadband providers, all operating using their own discrete facilities, for the most part.

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