Optical Connections Magazine Spring 2024

ANTONY SAVVAS FTTH ROLLOUT

RAMPING UP FTTH ROLLOUT: BUT IT HAS TO BE COST-EFFICIENT Governments, businesses and consumers are demanding more extensive and faster fibre-based networks, but how is the connectivity industry servicing these needs and what obstacles is it facing in delivering what is being demanded? Antony Savvas takes the pulse of an industry that is not being given an easy time of it.

hospitals, and utility companies,” Shore says. However, management consulting firm Arthur D. Little has set out some of the obstacles operators face in a challenging market. FINANCE Arthur D. Little recently published a “Next- stage fibre: a guide to FTTH refinancing” report, which floats “solutions for delivering on business plans in a turbulent time”. The report says the European FTTH market, for instance, is experiencing significant growth, with a projected 18% CAGR (compound annual growth rate) until 2026, but it warns that FTTH players face challenges in securing funding for projects. The value of the average fibre project deal in 2022 saw a substantial increase of more than 170%, but the refinancing difficulties are now here, says the consulting firm. Our analysis of 100 fibre project refinancing deals in Europe from 2020 to

2023, shows a transaction peak in 2021 (40 deals), followed by a 25% drop in 2022,” it says, having also recorded scaled- back projects in the US. FTTH operators therefore have to focus on getting more from each dollar, euro and pound they put into their networks, to help alleviate the macro-economic issues they are facing. They also must focus on trying to achieve faster roll-outs to pre-empt competition, achieve high penetration rates, sustain high average revenue per user (ARPU), and maintain low CAPEX per home passed (HP). SPEED Jürgen Hatheier, chief technology officer, international at Ciena, sees accelerated FTTx roll-outs as “crucial”. “To accomplish this, one critical element is the utilisation of advanced fibre-optic solutions that offer not only higher bandwidth, but which can also scale to meet future demands.” He says passive optical network (PON) technologies address this challenge by enabling the delivery of high-speed internet services to multiple customers

“The global initiative to expand fibre deployments will have a substantial and positive impact on the high-capacity connectivity services that network operators will be able to provide to both residential and business customers,” says Robert Shore, senior vice president of global marketing at Infinera. Network operators around the world are now largely focused on serving the residential broadband market, says Shore, and the services to serve that market are relatively low-speed and “barely scratch the surface” of the potential capabilities of that deployed fibre. But, adds Shore, “we are now starting to see the emergence of technology that can help these network operators better leverage their FTTx fibre assets”. These solutions provide the ability to deliver much higher speed services over the same fibre infrastructure as residential broadband services. “As a result, network operators will be able leverage their broadband fibre infrastructure to serve businesses, data centres, and municipal anchor customers such as libraries,

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