FTTH Conference 2014: Strategy, Process and Deployment in Europe

Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) deployment has often been hailed as a cure-all to the problems that are plaguing many communications service providers (CSPs) today. Across Europe, bandwidth is becoming a pronounced issue at a time when more people are streaming more data than ever before. The problem is usually one of economic feasibility. While 93 percent of households in the U.S. can choose between cable or DSL connections, only 42 percent of households in Europe can choose a cable connection.

Meanwhile, FTTH deployment is an even longer way off in many countries… but potential opportunities can make it worth exploring in more detail. CSPs have taken this to heart. The benefits of FTTH deployments are too big to overlook, and with the right planning and execution strategies, these investments can seriously pay off in the long run.

A Real-World Case Study

Comptel knows firsthand that FTTH deployment can yield countless opportunities for CSPs, because we’ve worked with a number of them and done it successfully. In 2011, Australia’s NBN Co selected Comptel to provide catalog-driven service fulfillment for a national broadband project and to ensure wholesale services were delivered quickly and efficiently across the fibre network to retail channels. Last year, we partnered with Alcatel-Lucent to provide Chorus New Zealand with a fibre fulfillment and inventory solution. The high-speed broadband network supports retail service providers that are experimenting with new services, and has opened up revenue opportunities for Chorus New Zealand and the CSP’s customers.

When the agility and flexibility of fibre are fully leveraged, then CSPs unlock a whole new world of potential, which is more important than ever, given the decline of traditional sources of revenue. So what’s really holding CSPs back when it comes to FTTH? There are a number of technical hurdles to overcome, but nothing that can’t be solved with the right tools.

The fibre rollout lifecycle will be covered in detail in a workshop during the FTTH Conference 2014 in Stockholm. Comptel will be presenting alongside Alcatel-Lucent, Comsof – iToolsOnline, GE Smallworld, and TE Connectivity, and speaking specifically to the timely and accurate orchestration, deployment and launch of such services. “Optimised Planning and Execution of FTTH Deployments: How to Increase the Success Rate of Your FTTH Project” will also educate operators on how they can:

• Plan a deployment without overspending on CAPEX and OPEX
• Create efficient operational processes
• Ensure effective network documentation

The workshop runs from 13:00 – 18:00 on 18 February. It’s in good company, too, with other sessions running throughout the day about the challenges and solutions facing FTTH, optimising FTTH with integrated solutions and showing case studies of successful deployments.

If you’re planning on attending the FTTH Conference 2014 and want to get in touch with Comptel, please reach out to us at [email protected] and see more details about the workshop with Comptel here.

Connect with me on Google+ or Twitter to keep in touch, or follow @ComptelCorp.

Reflections on LTE Advanced – Part One

When following the hot industry trends, I found a lot of excitement around LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) and wanted to share my thoughts on this emerging technology.

So what is LTE-A?

Well, in the simplest of terms, it’s the latest advancement in radio technology that will put one Gigabits/s bandwidth (or 1000 megabits/s) to your mobile device of choice, whether it’s a laptop, dongle, tablet or smartphone (and eventually feature phone). Network rollouts will occur once the technology is proven in trials and compatible devices are available.

For comparison, you can get up to 100 megabits/s through LTE technology and up to 24 megabits/s with ADSL technology. The bandwidth that LTE-A enables is similar to the fastest speeds from Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) technology and about three times faster than that of cable. It is also approved by the International Telecommunications Union as the true 4G technology irrespective of what industry marketing and some communications service providers (CSPs) are saying about LTE and DC-HSPA. Globally, we are just deploying LTE infrastructure, and thus, LTE-A will have its first major deployments sometime in the future.

Some Perspective

While the maximum speed will most likely be very theoretical, at least in the beginning, the technology promises to provide all of the bandwidth we need without wiring everything together physically, allowing for true mobility. To put that bandwidth into perspective, one HD quality video stream can consume up to tens of megabits per second depending on the encoding/decoding technology used. This would then decide how much of the CPU and graphics chip on your device would be used and how much battery life they consume on decoding the video feed. The less bandwidth that is consumed (and hence tighter compression used in video encoding), the more work the CPU and graphics chip will have to do, and more battery will be consumed. In theory, you would not need much video compression with LTE-A, as there is plenty of capacity and hence less demand on battery, CPUs and other chip development needs. Think about several HD video channels being streamed to your device and having the ability to use other services in parallel. It would also enable higher upload speeds, so your multi-megapixel DSLR pictures could be streamed to your cloud storage or photostream of choice in near real time.

Is there really a need for this much bandwidth?

I’ve witnessed first-hand that once more bandwidth is available, it will get used. Remember the times of MS-DOS and the famous statement that 640 kB of memory is enough for everything? I’m feeling a bit old here, but seriously, we are masters of consuming 97% of our hard drives, for example, no matter what the capacity is—and the same applies to bandwidth. With recent advancements in HD displays in relatively small form factor (e.g. retina display in the new Apple iPad), it’s almost guaranteed we will consume available bandwidth. I’d think, however, that with such bandwidth, the need for large local storage on devices becomes less important, especially as cloud storage is becoming more affordable. Hence, we will see more video-enabled devices with minimal, built-in storage capacity.

LTE-A sounds promising, right? In my next post, I’ll discuss this technology further and highlight some areas where there’s room for improvement.