There has been a wide range of news around FTTH over the past few days. It is striking to see on how many fronts FTTH is gaining momentum.

• DIY trench digging: already 80% of Lyse's customer base. But that's Norway.
• Emerging markets: fiber coming to Lebanon, India, India again, the Philippines, Iran and Estonia.
• Infrastructure-based competition: Swiss utilities are banding together and Swisscom is abandoning VDSL in larger cities in favour of FTTH.
• Munifiber: UTOPIA is picking up steam. Focus is on businesses now and Integra Telecom is added as a business-oriented service provider. Meanwhile, FuzeCore launched a 100/100 Mb/s service at 147 $/mo in the residential market.
• Business VAS: Eurofiber (a Reggefiber sister company in the Reggeborgh holding) launched a surveillance service with a third-party SP, DIT is beveiligen.
• Separation: Telstra may be allowed to buy into the NBN (capped at 49%), by first contributing fiber assets in exchange for 20%. One condition would be for the company to be functionally (?) separated.
• DOCSIS 3.0: Virgin is testing a 200 Mb/s service, but here is why it stands no chance against FTTH.
• 3-D: Digital Hollywood wants it to come to our homes and indeed one consultancy expects up to 10% of homes to be upgraded by 2012. Meanwhile, the new Pixar film UP opened the Cannes festival.

Update on FTTH: service provider issues

The world of fiber is moving fast, but it is not all good news. Since my previous update, some notable developments occured.

• Citynet (Amsterdam). First of all, I have to make a correction. Amsterdam does in principle offer enough room to allow for direct buried duct (not just direct buried cable). However, one of the project's execs points me to the fact that probably not a single Dutch town allows ducts of 30++ centimeter diameter to be buried. And that is what you would need to connect the central office to the aggregation point. Other than that, Citynet simply decided to go without ducts.
• UTOPIA and iProvo (Utah). Both projects are running into financial problems and are looking for refinancing. This article holds the key to the solution, I believe: better marketing. Wholesale projects such as these (and Citynet) require service providers for marketing. The trouble is, there may simply be too many SPs, which is confusing to the public (sources tell me this is an Amsterdam issue), or they may simply be too small, and cannot absorb the losses associated with the necessary investments (as seems to be the case in Utah). Furthermore, the Utah networks seem to be suffering from a limited product portfolio (no low tier product at a competitive price point). The issue reminds me of projects (Powell, Wyoming) that decide to allow for a service provider monopoly during the first several years of operation. Of course, pricing must be in order too (even if MSOs will launch targeted cheap offerings). EPB in Chattanooga targets to undercut market prices by 5-15%. By the way, Provo seems to have had offers for the iProvo network, but isn't ready to sell out.
• Database. I updated my FTTH 2007 - 2008 database for more details and lots of links.
• Financial models. I wonder if any of the projects has a financial model available. There are lots of consultants out there who are doing that laborious task.