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IN THE SECOND PART OF OUR SERIES ON THE FTTH ‘CHAIN’, KEELY PORTWAY CONSIDERS CHALLENGES DURING THE INSTALLATION STAGE OF WORKS, AND AVAILABLE SOLUTIONS
T
he importance of reliable connectivity has never been more recognised than now. While
ambitious targets have been in place across the world for fibre deployment for some time, the ongoing pandemic has served to push it to the forefront. Yet, there is still so much to be
done. Take Britain, for example, which, despite vocal recognition from the government, is still a fair way behind many of its Organisation for Economic Co- operation and Development (OECD) counterparts when it comes to fibre infrastructure. In fact, it ranks 35th out of the 37 OECD countries for the proportion
16 FiBRE SYSTEMS n Issue 30 n Winter 2021
of fibre in its total fixed broadband infrastructure. Te incumbents have been
playing their part to close the gap, but interestingly, it has been the emergence of the alternative network providers (altnets) that has really helped the UK catch up – particularly when it comes to some of the most under-served areas of rural Britain.
History repeating As a distributor of quality cable management products and specialist tooling for the communication industry, and an end-to-end solution provider to engineers since 1919, Mills is well placed to have been at the
forefront of many trends and challenges in the industry. Te company has shared its tooling, cabling systems, PIA and – in association with CommScope – connectivity equipment, not to mention their heritage of engineering experience, with larger and smaller providers alike for several decades. Chairman, Jerry Mills said: ‘I’m
proud of our heritage. We are a fourth-generation business and we have always been an engineering business. I joined towards the end of the 70s and what we’re seeing at the moment has some similarities with what happened with cable TV in the 80s, when American communication companies came
to the UK and installed coax cables to provide cable TV. Within about five years of that particular period, the cable TV companies realised that they could actually offer telephone over those particular cables. So they re-ran a lot of their existing cables in their existing ducts.’ Unlike American cable
companies from that decade, many emerging, smaller altnets don’t have sufficient financial backing for long-term network growth. Couple this with an ever-
changing market and its increased capacity demands, the independents see a significant change in network costs. To help the altnets, global
www.fibre-systems.com @fibresystemsmag
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