FTTH-related news round-up

• In the Netherlands, CIF is reaching the limits of growth, owning a range of small cable companies. Now they are looking to do rural FTTH, with partners, in a ‘line-rental’ model.
• FTTH is expanding in South Africa, of all places.
• Reggeborgh is selling a majority stake of Deutsche Glasfaser to KKR. Is that an early exit or a way to raise massive funds?
• Impressive cost savings from NG-PON2. It is being trialed by Vodafone.
• Structural separation in the UK? Vodafone appears to be the company with the strongest belief in both FTTH and Open Access. People cannot even agree on the UK’s performance in an international perspective. Of course, BT claims a top position, but others, speaking from experience, disagree strongly.
• A Hyperoptic survey points to real estate value increase from FTTP.
• Italy seems to be committed to nationwide FTTH, but remains a bit unclear on where they are.
• Google Fiber: a new unit in Alphabet and much more than a ‘hobby’. Challenged by Google, several operators are doing cross-state FTTH now: AT&T, TDS, CenturyLink and others. Comcast’s 2 Gb/s service: over FTTH and later over Docsis 3.1? It remains somewhat unclear. And the price is pretty outrageous.
• Speculation in Australia over NBN Co returning to FTTP, with Malcolm Turnbull as Prime Minister.
• Sandvine’s September 2015 edition of Global Internet Phenomena Report.
• The ITU State of Broadband 2015 report: 148 nations have an NBN plans.
• Akamai’s latest State of the Internet report.

Structural separation: great in theory (but so is communism)

Structural separation, separation of network and services, open access: it remains beautiful in theory but hard in practice.

Network and services are financially and operationally entirely different animals, but operators are simply reluctant to let go of the vertically integrated model.

• EE (UK mobile JV of DT and Orange): set off as wholesale-only, but decided to enter the retail services market.
• LightSquared (4G in the US): never got off the ground as wholesale-only provider, albeit for entirely different reasons (interference).
• Reggefiber (FTTH in NL) set out as a wholesale-only network builder with an operator and a services branch to get things off the ground. Indeed, it succeeded in selling the ISPs to KPN, but itself will be rolled into KPN as well. Effectively, it will end up being the NetCo of a vertically integrated player.
• CIF (FTTH in NL) wanted to sell its services branch Caiway to KPN, but this was prevented by the competition council. No other buyer seems on the horizon, leaving CIF a vertically integrated player as well.
• Several open access FTTH operators in the US: the incumbent shuns using their networks and small ISPs appear to have just too little weight to pull of the job. And so, Provo ends up in the hands of Google.
• Google Fiber itself promised an open access model, but this isn't happening either. Google is providing services itself.

Singapore seems to be pulling of the separation model, even though SingTel is trying to grab hold of the passive layer (which it will be required to spin off). The Australia NBN appears to be a disaster. (Who ever advised the NBN Co? Who so shamefully failed in carrying out the business plan according to plan?)