Around Europe incumbent Telco’s are proposing “Fibre to the Cabinet” as their answer to NGA. Here in Ireland, eircom are following this trend.
“FTTC” or “Fibre to the Copper” as I call it, simply isn’t what Ireland needs right now.
While deploying fibre as far as the cabinet does allow you to squeeze more capacity out of the copper, it still places the old, constrained network at the heart of telecommunications. Additionally, it only offers short term relief to the bandwidth bottleneck. It will inevitably require a second round of  investment when consumers run out of bandwidth and/or when the copper ceases to be fit for purpose. The second round of upgrading and investment will bring “Fibre to the Home” or “FTTH”.
So why wait? Why waste money on an unnecessary interim investment when FTTH is inevitable. Not only will you end up spending significantly more money, you’ll also lose the advantage of being an early mover. FTTC only makes sense for incumbent Telco’s trying to protect declining revenues on an aging network with constrained capital.
We all know the bandwidth demands being placed on networks are growing, so investing in a network that supports fast ADSL, with maximum speed of 40Mbs seems largely at odds with trying to position this country centrally in the global digital age.
As a result of our economic plight, we have to be clever in how we spend any funds available. Bearing that in mind, I’d pose a question; should we invest in a solution that is, at best, short sighted or one that is completely future proofed and would offer us the real possibility of having a truly world class telecommunications infrastructure and position us to reap the rewards.
The actual demand out there for fibre is very limited amongst consumers and businesses, maybe 5-10% tops, you can see it in the UK and elsewhere, the investment case for FTTH doesn’t exist
I agree with you from a telco point of view but the business case is there for National Government’s to do this. See some of my previous blogs but essentially all major public policy areas can benefit from a FTTH / FTTB rollout …it drives economic growth, it transforms the educational system for our children, increases efficiency in the healthcare system, supports the green / sustainability agenda, assists with overall public sector reform…the list goes on and on.
No demand for fibre? If you had never seen or heard of a car then all you could reasonably expect is a faster horse (paraphrasing Steve Jobs!) People are waking up to the fact that faster download is only part of the solution (which ADSL can deliver). What people will need in the future is very low latency and symmetrical upload speeds (for two way communications) that only fibre can deliver. It WILL happen – the only questions are WHEN and who is going to pay for it. Incumbent Telcos generally don’t have the money to invest in future-proof communications infrastructure so will default to technologies that deliver a stop-gap leveraging an established (and largely paid for) copper infrastructure in the last mile. I agree with the blog – isn’t it better to bite the bullet and build these future-proof networks now?