PETER DYKES MONETISING FIBRE
FIBRE OPTIC NETWORKS: WHERE’S THE MONEY?
With the mass migration of many of the world’s telecommunications networks to fibre from copper, and the increasingly fast rollout of FTTx, the obvious question is how to monetise fibre effectively. Early residential, business and wholesale service strategies have been put in place, but it seems these strategies for monetisation are limited. In a recent Optical Connections webinar, senior industry experts examined the issue of monetisation and concluded that it will depend largely on the implementation of new technologies and the rate at which they can be implemented. In this feature, Optical Connections’ contributing editor Peter Dykes teases out some of the prevailing arguments put forward.
A UNIQUE SITUATION It’s long been recognised that
400Mbps upstream costs less than €20 per month. Similarly, in the Swiss market, many operators are delivering 10Gbps for around CHf40 Swiss francs, which means we’re getting to the point where the Gigabit is becoming democratised. He added, “We’re almost getting to the point where the bandwidth is becoming irrelevant as a point of differentiation. We’re entering into an era, for the first time ever, of a bandwidth abundance, [in which] for a relatively modest bandwidth, most consumers with access to fibre, can afford a service that far exceeds their capabilities to consume that service - and that’s a unique time in the industry. We’ve never had that before, so it’ll be interesting to see how services and applications adopt to take advantage of all of that new capacity.” WHICH TECHNOLOGY? The panel were in agreement that significant monetisation could only
be achieved through the choice of technology. Raza Khan, senior marketing manager, Wireless Products in the Signal Integrity Group at Semtech said that while the data throughput for residential, business and wholesale will increase exponentially in the coming years, there is also the demands of 5G and later 6G to consider. He says, “what this really means is that any new infrastructure or equipment that’s deployed, needs to be able to handle all that future capacity and end user throughput, particularly starting from the front haul, and then all the way back as the infrastructure moves towards the core. So that’s where it’s important to start thinking about scalable technologies, technologies that can help people, better for the environment, be low power and low latency.” However, he adds, “It’s not a one solution fits all scenario. It’s a complex architecture, to say the least,
replacing copper with fibre will open up new revenue possibilities but once throughput demands and pricing issues have been resolved, monetisation depends largely on an operator’s overall technology development strategy. Doug Blue, Business Development North America at Nokia said the industry has historically been focusing on price, speed, latency and network performance. However, he said, “If you’re offering a Gig symmetrical, and another company offers a similar type solution for $20, or €20 less, there is always a possibility that customer will migrate to the lower cost solution, especially if they don’t see much value.” Ronan Kelly, Adtran’s CTO, EMEA, agreed that pricing and bandwidth are not key to monetisation. He points out that for example, in the Italian market, 5Gbps downstream and
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| ISSUE 30 | Q3 2022
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