FTTH snippets from around the world

Several FTTH related news items caught the eye over the past few days. More about the Dutch market in the next few days/weeks, rumour has it. For your diary: Singapore is set to decide on the OpCo of its NGNBN within the next few days; Australia is to pick the winners of its NBN RfP.

• Green: Verizon FiOS uses just 38% of the energy that its copper network uses.
• SMP. The proposed KPN/Reggefiber joint venture in the Netherlands is drawing criticism. Both cable operators and unbundlers are preparing legal action. One can only guess what it's about, but I suspect the wholesale tariffs for access to the passive infrastructure are way too high and will be contested.
• Open access. Bell Canada is fighting it, Ziggo is denying the business case (he prefers a duopoly) for it and TDC Cable will have to allow unbundlers onto its network. The latter case will be interesting to follow, to see if this technically and commercially works.
  
• Cable. Kabel Noord, a small MSO (23k subs) in the Netherlands is embracing FTTH for new builds and fully acknowledges the benefits (bandwidth, symmetrical, not just VoD but TVoD as well).
• Munifiber. Alas, the Palo Alto project fell through. First, Axia's financier quit, and then (when Axia asked the city to pony up the money) Axia itself hung up.
• M&A. Telefonica supposedly is close to a deal to buy both Hansenet and United Internet. It will be interesting to see how they will fight an incumbent that is equally conservative as the Spanish mothership.
• In-building. Ericsson has demo'd 500 Mb/s over 500 meters, using 6 bonded pairs. Sounds a lot like solving the in-building problem (for a much faster roll-out).
• Services. Anderson (Indiana) is contributing a service, as part of the answer to the question: do we need all that bandwidth. It's called storage.

I will be meeting a bunch of fiber people over the next few days, from OBR (munifiber Rotterdam), Reggefiber and PacketFront, so keep posted.