Also in today s EMEA regional roundup: Spotify complaint could spell EU trouble for Apple; Equinix opens data center in Bordeaux; Ericsson s Ekholm sounds off on 5G.
The pace of superfast (30 Mbit/s-plus) broadband take-up in France picked up in Q4 2020, with an additional 1.1 million connections being added during the quarter. This the headline finding of the latest scoreboard from regulator Arcep. Over the course of 2020, subscriptions to FTTH connections increased by more than 3.3 million, while the number of copper-based connections fell by 2.5 million. The total number of broadband connections, both superfast and notsofast, stood at 30.6 million at the end of 2020, a rise of 800,000 on the previous year.
The problem of vendor interoperability has been a thorn in the sides of service providers for many years, as they try to balance cost considerations and product options with efficiency.
Maria Alejandro, FTTH global lab manager for GPONDoctor, co-founded GPONDoctor in 2016 to address vendor interoperability issues that arose as the GPON standard was being defined. At the time, Alejandro and her two co-founders were working in a major European research and development center called Tecnalia Research and Innovation, and were also collaborating with Telefónica, which was the first service provider to express interest in GPONDoctor s GPON Analyzer. Now we are present in more than 30 countries all around the world and many of our customers are well-known companies in the telecommunications market, says Alejandro.
From a broad point of view, next-generation access network activity slowed for many cable operators in 2020 as they focused on splitting nodes and adding capacity to existing network gear to keep up with the traffic surge fueled by the pandemic. However, Comcast said its work around network virtualization and the use of new AI and machine learning techniques that optimize and enhance the performance of the access network accelerated over the past year. We have not slowed down anything We have not stopped and not blinked, Elad Nafshi, senior vice president of next-generation access networks, at Comcast Cable, said. Everything I ve asked for from an access network standpoint, the company has stood behind and provided investment.