Laying fibre optic cables between customers and their local exchange is the only way to achieve 100 per cent broadband coverage it has been claimed.
Warning that the European digital divide will deepen, The Fibre to the Home (FTTH) Council Europe has advocated that regulators and government take urgent action to promote fibre broadband services.
Speaking at their 2006 conference in Vienna, Hartwig Tauber, FTTH Council president, urged that the EU and national governments must accelerate investment, educate users and service providers in the benefits of FTTH, but above all attempt to create a more open and consistent regulatory framework.
“Rules for public funding need defining. Otherwise infrastructure companies will ask why they should invest if they don’t know whether the network they build will be unbundled and if so what the rules will be,” Tauber commented.
He added that the EU’s strategy to build a single European information economy based on ubiquitous affordable broadband services, announced in June 2005, was an important rallying call. But this needed to be followed up quickly by action to clarify the regulatory situation.
Ending the the digital divide was a major goal of the European Union’s i2010 strategy, but, said Tauber: “In cities three times as many households have broadband as in rural areas. FTTH is the only infrastructure that can satisfy all the requirements of i2010.”
Fibre to the Home is very much in its infancy in the UK, mainly due to uncertainty over hardware installations into local exchanges that are, for the most part, operated solely by BT. This is what all the ‘unbundling of the local loop’ debate is all about; creating competition for service provision over telecommunications networks.
The US and Japan, by contrast, are now seeing more people sign up for FTTH services than for traditional ‘copper wire’ or other broadband technologies. A major reason for this is that unlike normal landline broadband, there is no drop off in speed due to distance from the local exchange.
