Building Business Cases for Fibre and VDSL2

IanFogg | March 14, 2007, 03:17 PM

As the results season draws to a close, it's clear all the major European operators are grappling with:

1. When to invest in new broadband infrastructure and how fast.

2. Whether to invest extremely heavily in fibre to the home (FTTH) or to the building, or whether to invest less to build fibre to the street cabinet with VDSL2 then copper. The cable guys have their own DOCSIS3 upgrade on the roadmap.

3. Will consumers pay increased fees for very high speed broadband Internet access? Or will they even continue to pay what they pay now?

4. What, if any, new value-added broadband Internet services or content could be built on these new broadband networks that consumers will pay for? Will this justify the capex? Or is the capex table stakes to remain competitive in fixed broadband?

5. Do future operational cost savings justify the capex outlay?

6. Do future bundled products that are not the Internet - e.g. HDTV, IPTV, video communications etc. - justfiy the capex spend with increased revenues?

7. If FTTH/B, which technology route to go down, PON or point to point?

These are all good questions. We'll be covering these topics in a variety of different reports over the coming months.

But for now, I'd strongly advise all European operators to read this new Jupiter report which goes a long way to helping to understand consumers' views of broadband access:

Net Neutrality in Europe - Navigate Through Future Internet Access and Distribution Models

The report includes a segmentation of online consumers that reveals some rather startling links between consumers that object to limitations on their broadband connection and the best consumer prospects for Internet paid content and services.

Clients - I'm very happy to discuss anything in this report on a call or by email.