FROM THE INDUSTRY
Of course, some of the altnets will run out of money and go into liquidation and the healthy ones will refinance and grab new customers.
In the US it’s very different.
What’s happening there? The big cable operators are committed to rolling out DOCSIS 4.0, although there is still some debate about Extended Spectrum versus Full Duplex. But alongside that, an array of huge government stimuli have been created to underpin the roll-out of rural broadband; The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) programme alone was worth $43 Billion and there are other programmes such as the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) worth $20 Billion. Those funding programmes are still being ramped up. With fibre penetration in the US around 45%, there is still plenty of room to grow. Many analysts are predicting that the US fibre penetration will double over the next ten years. Do you think innovation or a relative lack of it at this stage has affected the industry? if so, how? Part of the fun in the cable industry over the last 20 years or so, was that it was largely driven by fast waves of innovation. We started with just simple broadcast video and ended up with symmetrical gigabit services running on basically the same network. However at the same time, innovations in mobile technology 4G/5G has made us less dependent on the fixed connections in our homes and have also changed our viewing habits - think of Netflix. In 2012 wifi was in only 25% of homes, whereas today…. Most of the innovation happening in cable today is happening behind the scenes – how do we automate the network to lower costs? How do we use new technology to give a better customer experience?
Broadband still seems tantalisingly out of reach for an unacceptable number of rural homes in the UK. What do you see happening that might change this? Government commitment for complete coverage is important. Consolidation in the altnet market will help, bigger companies, with more geographical areas will have more incentive to fill in the holes in their coverage maps. Having more flexible solutions for the last mile will definitely help to lower the burden of hardest to connect places, by the lowering the cost of doing so. Have we reached a critical mass in terms of the sector’s growth? Have we peaked or is it still a few years away? Most analysts are predicting that the UK (and European) Pay TV subscribers will continue to decline by around 2 million by
2029, so that is significant. This will hit the cable and satellite providers the hardest. Cable has peaked. Fibre has not yet peaked. That market has a bit of a headwind right now, it should come back strong if the current geopolitical instabilities we’re seeing correct themselves. Geopolitical instability is a massive factor. What about climate change? Following Hurricane Melton and Helene, an awful lot of broadband is going to have to be reconstructed. That’s a lot of fibre build; tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of homes need reconnecting. In the US much of the construction is on poles, meaning that a substantial amount of reconstruction will have to be done. The bigger point here is that the telecommunications industry (which currently accounts for about 3% of the annual global consumption of energy needs to start figuring out how to consume less energy, while at the same
1 https://www.fierce-network.com/broadband/analysts-predict-us-fiber-subs-double-next-10-years-45m#:~:text=The%20penetration%20metric%20 is%20on,as%20of%20June%2030%2C%202023.
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Volume 46 No.4 DECEMBER 2024
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