NEWS EU majors still absent from FTTH ranking


ACCORDING to the latest FTTH Council update, released at BBWF on Wednesday, Lithuania, Norway and Spain still hold posi- tion as the top three FTTH economies in Eu- rope. New entrants Spain and Luxembourg joined the FTTH ranking table, but the UK is still missing, according to the group. The statistics rank the European 22


FTTH economies where more than one per cent of the households are FTTH/B subscribers. Europe overall reported a solid 16.4 per


cent increase in the number of FTTH/B subscribers during the first half of 2012 and FTTH/B coverage across Europe con- tinued to grow rapidly at 16 per cent over the same period. By mid-2012, Europe had some 5.95 million FTTH/B subscribers and 32 million homes passed. In the ranking, the leaders remain


unaltered. Lithuania has reached over 30 per cent penetration, followed by Norway at 18 per cent and Sweden at 14.5 per cent. Spain entered the ranking in 20th position with 1.42 per cent penetration, following a 44 per cent subscriber increase in first half of 2012. Despite the country’s challenging


economic situation, operator announce- ments from Telefonica and Orange Spain amongst others suggest fibre is still considered a solid investment, the FTTH Councils said. Meanwhile, Luxembourg reported


1.46 per cent subscriber penetration and marked another new entry. State-owned P&T Luxembourg appears set to realise ambitious government objectives with 80 per cent of all households passed with 100Mbps by the end of 2013, and 100 per cent at the end of 2015. According to the report, Russia offers huge


market potential, with 5.2 million FTTH/B subscribers and 15.8 million homes passed. While Ukraine has over a million FTTH/B subscribers, which is an increase of more than 85 per cent during the first semester of 2012 with new players expected to deploy FTTH/B in more CIS countries soon. However, some large EU economies,


including the UK and Germany, remain conspicuously absent from the FTTH ranking. The UK has the lowest FTTH subscriber penetration rate in the region, with only 0.05 per cent of households con-


Comcast reveals IPv6 targets


US cable operator Comcast plans to have IPv6 available to all its customers by mid-2013, its Distinguished Engineer & Chief Architect for IPv6 John Brzozowski, told an audience at the Broadband World Forum. Brzozowski said that Comcast’s plan was to deploy IPv6 incrementally, and the priority was to ensure that it would not affect its customers’ experience. “We are not going to die the death of 1,000 cuts,” he said. Currently 50 per cent of its customer base can access IPv6 he said, but he re- vealed only one per cent of its total traffic was IPv6 end-to-end. However, that repre- sents a growth of 375 per cent from June 2011. A year later, in June 2012, Comcast participated in World IPv6 Day, which Br- zozowski said helped “move the needle,” as far as IPv6 usage was concerned, with all of Comcast’s goals achieved in advance of the 6 June 2012 deadline. The destination


of most traffic was YouTube and Netflix. Brzozowski said he expected to see a sig- nificant increase in IPv6 usage by the end of the year, and conservatively estimated that ten per cent of its customers would be using IPv6 by the end of 2013. Internally, all of Comcast’s services are


IPv6 ready and, using a home-grown met- ric platform, Brzozowski said the firm had found evidence that it improved network efficiency. One of the bottlenecks for IPv6 adop-


tion he said was in the home, due to many internet connected consumer electronics devices such as TVs and Blu-ray players not being IPv6 capable. To counter this, Brzozowski said he has joined a work- ing group of the Consumer Electronics Association in order to help educate the industry. There was much interest in the issue he said, but still a good deal of work to be done.


Augmenting print


AUGMENTED reality continues to be seen as one of those sexy technologies that has captured the industry’s atten- tion but has yet to find a strong business model. Speaking in the Business Model Transformation stream at BBWF yester- day, Raimo Van der Klein Creative director and co founder of


04 THURSDAY 18TH OCTOBER 2012


Amsterdam-based Layar, said his com- pany was now looking to print as a “very fertile” land of opportunity. Van der Klein acknowledged that


while newspapers are struggling, he believes that magazines are still in a strong position, especially those cater- ing to niche subjects and fan bases.


nected. Despite the fact that the govern- ment has announced plans to have the best superfast broadband network in Europe by 2015, the UK is clearly lagging and has no large scale FTTH deployment plans, the Council said. After having announced a very ambitious


FTTH coverage objective in 2011 2.5 million homes passed at end 2012 BT has changed its FTTH strategy once again. The UK in- cumbent has now decided to mostly upgrade


its existing copper network to offer FTTC. “Key countries absent from the ranking


may miss out on their chance to build a sustainable future for their citizens”, said Hartwig Tauber, Director General of FTTH Council Europe. “Additional efforts are required to ensure Europe reaches the Digital Agenda 2020 broad- band targets. The decision to invest in FTTH—the only future-proof solution— needs to be made today.”


DT CTO calls for simpler cloud


THERE is a clear need for standardisa- tion of network virtualisation and cloud services—that was the verdict of Bruno Jacobfeuerborn, chief technology officer at Deutsche Telekom, who delivered a key- note presentation at the Broadband World Forum yesterday morning. Marxist theory made an appearance at


the beginning of his presentation—Jacob- feuerborn suggested that it is now easier to start up an enterprise as capital is more widely distributed than at the time of Marx in 19th century Germany. This in turn brought comparison with


internet access: “if you have network access, you are part of the [internet] com- munity, if not then you are out”, stated the DT exec—a metaphor apt for the audi- ence, comparing connectivity to capital. If connectivity is capital then the


network has great status, and Jacobfeu- erborn approached the delicate balance of relations between OTT players and network providers head on. The OTT view of operators, he said, was that they are not innovative, they are highly complex and they are slow, cumbersome dumb pipes. Historically, he suggested, this might not have been altogether unreasonable. But networks are evolving to be agile, flexible, cloud-based intelligent pipes and their status in the ecosystem should reflect this. “We do more, we have infrastructure, we have more in the value chain,” he said. He then ran through the cloud services


that Germany’s biggest telco has offered to date—starting with private cloud services


in 2006 such as platforms as a service, and business processes as a service, then going on to public cloud services such as infrastructure as a service and desktop as a service. Despite the technical progress that has


been made however, there is a danger of complacency here, according to Jacobfeu- erborn: “If you think you have everything under control, be aware that maybe you are not fast enough [to deal with new developments or change]”. At which point he issued a call for


greater standardisation work on virtualisa- tion in the packet core, which he presented as a question and answer: “What does the new standard for virtual appliances look like? We need professional operator and vendor forums.” Answering a question on likely time


frames from Mark Newman, chief research officer at Informa Telecoms & Media, he added that an operator must first remove legacy architecture and other blockages, which will inevitably take years to achieve. The operator community can learn much from the IT space, he said, shifting operator IT out into the cloud. As others have suggested this week, B/OSS is particularly problematic, he said. “That is why we have to get rid of it and virtualise the network.” The CTO ended by calling for greater


architectural simplicity: “We have to change the cloud architecture, we have to simplify, we have to work with vendors— then we will be successful.”


BROADBAND WORLD FORUM DAILY 2012 I http://www.broadbandworldforum.com/


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