FROM THE INDUSTRY
customers are integrating cable with mobile. A cable operator has a number of advantages in terms of doing mobile, because they have power everywhere and have a high-speed broadband backhaul everywhere, which nobody else has. It’s a completely different landscape in North America. Has that influenced the direction of the kind of products you’re developing? In some ways yes, but still half of our business is in Europe; there is still a lot of significance in cable broadband. Where there’s no ducting cable – Netherlands, Belgium, Germany - we are pretty sure those markets will continue for another 15, 20 years. Also in countries where there is ducting running fibre down existing ducts isn’t as easy as it first seems – ducts have often collapsed or are crushed because they are under foot paths. In terms of mini-cells and WiFi hotspots, that’s really where Technetix can be very innovative in coming up with solutions to help operators maximise their networks – our knowledge of RF gives us the edge as we don’t have to simply buy system on a chip (SOC) solutions. Making the most of what we have, in other words. Correct. In the end, it’s all about sweating the assets. It’s all very well to say, “Oh yes, let’s rip it all out and put in fibre,” but it’s not very green. Trenching uses a lot of energy and that involves discarding a system that works. Rebuilding broadband has become much more mature. It’s just like water, electricity, gas. It’s a utility. Once you have a working system, it is better to just improve what you have rather than rebuild. And when the roll out’s complete? you’ll be maintaining the networks as opposed to installing? It’s like maintaining the Forth Bridge; the work never ends. We have lots of options. In the US and Canada, we have solutions for creating fibre extensions; in remote areas where there’s a village two miles here or five miles there, we have fibre extensions that you can add on to
How did you cope during the pandemic? Through Covid, we were in a position where we had a standby capital facility just in case our factories were unable to operate; fortunately, we managed to keep all our operations going. We never failed to deliver. In terms of financially, the company has virtually close to zero debt. We are quite a conservative company, and in troubling times that’s always good.
the HFC network. We have an overlay system in Germany and Austria, where the operator can do backhaul for mobile base stations; they can get the backhaul signals to and from the base station so they don’t have to run new wires, they can actually use their existing capacity. A lot of operators now have WiFi hotspots, which is quite a good way to find your customers, because if a customer moves into a house, they want broadband, to switch on their laptop, find WiFi, and they can then find the operation and pay to get hotspot access. And then once you’ve created the relationship, away you can go with fitting them with a fixed broadband connection. This industry has weathered a lot of storms. Which ones stick out in your memory? There have always been challenges. Our book describes in the early days of Technetix when we had the telecom meltdown. At that time, we were mainly in the UK, Netherlands and Spain, and then NTL, Telewest and UPC Netherlands, our top three customers, all went bust! However, none of them ever failed to pay a bill, because when you have an asset, you have to take it forward. Things were a little bit stickier in 2008 where the banks were in trouble; one week they were trying to get us to go out and do lots of acquisitions, and then suddenly they wanted their money back. But since then, I think, well, the company’s got much much stronger. We’re also much stronger at managing ourselves, managing risk.
In the States, or looking further afield?
Mainly in North America. The European market has got great growth in fibre, but in terms of cable, there’s a few countries like Netherlands and Germany where there’s going to be massive investments in the cable infrastructure, but there’s other parts of Europe like Southern Europe, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, where it’s all FTTX. Technetix appears to be a very proactive company. Do you have a clear strategic vision of where you want to go? In terms of the cable broadband market, we’re clear that the total available cable access market is something in the range of $2bn. Technetix can achieve a certain percentage of it, but in order to grow we need to focus on FTTX, which is probably
May 2024 Volume 46 No.2
41
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online