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FEATURE FTTH IN THE AMERICAS
‘No fibre to the home plan by an incumbent is
complete without a scenario about copper switch-off. And yet precious few incumbents seem to even be considering the question,’ said Benoit Felten, chief research officer at Diffraction Analysis. ‘Managing two networks in parallel to serve the same customers is nonsensical. Sure, an operator can view fibre as a premium product, only offered to the wealthy few, but there’s no significant profit in that. Fibre to the home is a scale game.’
Big decision Tat doesn’t mean switching the copper off is a trivial decision, though: in many cases copper products are resold to competitors through unbundling, who will resist change because they fear losing their customers or their investment in equipment. Regulation usually prevents the network owner from unilaterally shutting down the copper and kicking the wholesale access seeker off the network. Regulators will insist on alternative provision. But even when alternatives to unbundling have been made available, it’s a huge disruption for everyone. Spain has been the fastest country to build out
FTTH in Europe, with fibre-optic cables now reaching 31 million premises – more than France, Germany, the UK and Italy combined. Telefónica plans to consolidate and close legacy copper facilities where it deploys fibre, but progress is slow. Under regulations established in 2009, Telefónica is obliged to offer unbundled copper services for a period of five years aſter filing a decommissioning request, to give wholesale customers time to move to alternative products. Te process can only be accelerated in facilities where there are no wholesale customers; the first batch of planned closures in 2015 were small COs, where the local loop was not shared.
Te five-year notice period arises from the
European Commission’s Recommendation of September 2010 on Regulated Access to Next Generation Access Networks (NGA). In 2012, Orange France launched a ‘100 per cent Fiber’ pilot in Palaiseau, a suburb of Paris with around 17,000 households, to assess and anticipate the challenges associated with copper switch-off. One of the reasons the Palaiseau experiment failed to progress was because Orange was unable to negotiate an earlier date with alternative operators to close down the main distribution frames where the latter had installed their equipment; this meant Orange was obliged to maintain wholesale access until 2018. In the United States, copper retirement rules
have been in place since 2003, and (aſter some revisions in 2015 and 2017) mandate a shorter, six-month notice period for both retail and wholesale customers, as well as suitable replacements for legacy services. Regulatory authorisation is not required unless copper retirement will also result in a discontinuance of service (where there is no like-for-like service replacement). So, it could be argued that Verizon faced fewer regulatory hurdles to its copper retirement plans.
No more dial tone Tightly linked with the challenge of copper switch-off is the migration of the public-switched telephone network (PSTN) – which has provided dial-tone telephony services for the past 100 years – to newer packet-based technologies. Tis has proven to be a complex organisational and technical challenge for operators, which has taken longer to implement than anyone originally thought. A case in point: UK incumbent BT said it wanted to be the first major operator to switch off its PSTN, and it’s 21 Century Network was
After Hurricane Sandy, Verizon found it was
too difficult, expensive and time-consuming to rescue the existing copper network
designed to support this ambition; but while BT now has a perfectly good packet-based core network, PSTN services won’t be turned down until 2025. Twisted-pair copper cables were an integral
part of the original PSTN; but they can also remain part of the network in a next-generation access deployment, in fibre to the cabinet, node or distribution point strategies. Many operators have pushed ahead with fibre deployment while leaving the PSTN intact. Tat’s going to become an increasingly difficult position for telecom operators to maintain, as the cost of operating two networks – one circuit-based, one packet- based – will continue to increase, especially as it becomes more expensive to repair out-of-service equipment and the skills base needed to maintain old equipment becomes lost. Te question of what to do with the copper is
more pressing as FTTH roll out becomes more widespread. ‘Many operators who started this [FTTH deployment] years ago are now in the 40–50 per cent take rates in areas where they have deployed fibre. Te question of what to do with the copper becomes acute,’ said Felten. Operators should see the deployment of fibre in the access as a golden opportunity to switch customers to packet-based services at the same time. In practice, the two upgrades do not always align. While a lot of copper to fibre migration has
The question of what to do with the copper is becoming more pressing as FTTH roll out becomes more widespread
already occurred, there’s still a massive task ahead for the incumbents. ‘We may be talking about copper to fibre migration for the next 10 to 15 years,’ said Blondel.l
Issue 19 • Summer 2018 FIBRE SYSTEMS 33
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