Sumoband / Orange's Fibre to the Home

IanFogg | December 15, 2006, 10:40 AM

Orange, as expected, has announced an acceleration of their FTTH plans for France. Although, they take a less comparative, but equally accurate, line in their news release: "Early stage deployment..."

In part, this is in response to Free's fibre announcement earlier this year.

The series of briefings is continuing as I write, so these are very early takes:

- Both Orange and Free are right. This is an early stage deployment for Europe. France will be an extremely unusual country to have two major FTTH providers in 2007.

- Orange's FTTH will be differentiated on speed from Free. Free are targeting 50Mbps compared with Orange's 'up to' 100Mbps symmetric, presumably with tiered packages. It's not yet clear how much of Orange's line speed will be available for Internet access and how much will be for IPTV, video telephony, VoIP and the rest. Hopefully, there should be plenty of bandwidth to go around, provided Orange puts in sufficient backhaul and shared capacity contention issues don't impact actual speeds.

- Orange look to be positioning their service at a higher price than Free's Euro29.99 (which is for a bundle of IPTV, Internet and VoIP). Orange are hoping that better services and higher speed will compensate for a higher end user price, but Free's keen pricing is going to pull down what Orange will be able to charge. In both cases, the business case for these FTTH roll outs looks to be based on corporate strategic objectives rather than near term profitability.

- Sumoband is a better English term for FTTH speeds than a direct translation of "Très Haut Débit" Broadband in France is called "Haut Débit". While "Très Haut Débit" is a natural extension for fibre-based services it doesn't work so well in English. Broaderband, Ultraband, Widerband, etc. are all ugly. I vote for Sumoband!

- Sumoband's speeds will create a platform for new services. Broadband removed the pain of dial-up but more importantly provided the audience for Skype, Youtube, Flickr and numerous other Internet businesses plus all those "wonderful" illegal file sharing applications. Timing will be everything for those looking to leverage.

- Sumoband's development will not be anything like as rapid as ADSL2+. FTTH is costly and time consuming to install. Look at Verizon's FIOS service for current examples. ADSL2+ was a simple upgrade to many existing DSLAMs and could reach large numbers of households quickly. Orange are aiming for 150-200,000 customers out of an addressable audience of just 1 million by the end of 2008, almost two years (21 months) after the service launches.