Also in today s EMEA regional roundup: Fastweb taps Amdocs for network inventory upgrade; MTN seeks $5 billion valuation of mobile money unit ahead of stake sale; A1 Telekom Austria brings your package inside.
Telecom Italia (TIM) is congratulating itself on completing its fiber rollout in the north-east Italian region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, using a mix of FTTC, FTTH, FWA and satellite technologies. Those households and businesses connected to FTTH will enjoy downlink speeds of up to 1 Gbit/s; up 200 Mbit/s must suffice for those on FTTC. Across the country, says the operator, TIM s fiber network is now available to 92% of those households that use the fixed network. Earlier this month TIM announced the completion of shareholder agreements with KKR Infrastructure and Swisscom-owned Fastweb that, in theory at least, allow FiberCop, Italy s last-mile network grid, to commence operations. (See FiberCop is go after KKR and Fastweb firm up stakes and Italy s TIM seeks co-investors to
Orange Poland has announced a partnership with Dutch pension fund APG that aims to speed the rollout and reduce the cost of its fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network throughout the country.
The operator, which is majority owned by France-based Orange, said it has created a 50:50 joint venture called FiberCo with APG, which is the asset management division of ABP.
The new JV will take over 2.4 million connections, including 1.7 million households that are set to be passed by the network in the next five years.
The remaining connections are to be contributed by Orange Poland, which covered 5 million households with its fiber network at the end of 2020.
News Analysis Robert Clark 4/12/2021
The Biden Administration s $100 billion broadband plan marks the end of an era.
Since telecom reform began in the mid-80s with the breakup of the old AT&T it s been big telecom that has driven the industry, constrained by no more than light-touch regulation.
That s been the case not just in the US but across the OECD and much of the developing world.
The new Biden plan, hazy as it still is, drives the last nail in the coffin of the old regime.
Just as the deregulation era was driven by wider economic trends and new technology that rendered obsolete the natural monopoly concept, today s change is driven by an equally broad recognition that we need governments to do certain things, like manage health crises and ensure access to affordable broadband.
A convergence of technology innovations is giving rise to a new concept of routed optical networking in which Layer 3 becomes the switching layer across a DWDM transport layer. The key advances are the commercialization of 400Gbps pluggable coherent optics, the emergence of multi-terabit network processing units (NPUs) for routers, and continuing advances in telemetry and software automation for IP networks. While sharing some of the same heritage, the new routed optical network is not your father s IP over DWDM.
Defined as the physical integration of DWDM optics into a router, the concept of IP over DWDM (or IPoDWDM) has been around for decades with continuing interest from operators that never translated into large-scale deployments. Explaining the appeal is simple: placing DWDM optics directly into the router eliminates the transponder shelf and optics between routers and DWDM systems a capex win.
US cable operators and other wired broadband service providers likely won t have to fret too much about SpaceX s Starlink in the coming years. But the emerging satellite broadband service is poised to play a significant role in providing service in rural US areas alongside opportunities in the much larger global market, according to one analyst study. We have no trouble imagining Starlink as a potential game-changer for helping to bridge the digital divide in the US, Craig Moffett, analyst with MoffettNathanson, explained in a new report that dissects the potential for the satellite broadband service. The opportunity outside the US, where broadband availability is generally lower, is even larger. The product appears to deliver what it promises. Globally, the rural opportunity is a very, very big one.