Is fiber an evolution or a revolution?
In choosing the name of this blog I decided to keep the ambiguity alive. Fiber has been here for awhile, I myself started working on fiber services back in 1997, and it had already been there a while. Of course, it was for business customers, nobody back then dared imagine that one day residential customers would be the potential buyers of such access technology. In that sense, fiber may be just an evolution, if that.
Then again, a good case could be made for a fiber revolution. A revolution of the telecoms industry but also of many related industries. Think about it: broadband, with its limited bandwidth capacity has already made (and disposed of) telecom players all around the world, it has contributed to destabilising the whole entertainment industry, and that's just a beginning...
Imagine now that all the real or perceived gluts of a 10 Mb/s download and a 1 Mb/s upload dissapear, or very near so. Imagine also that the incumbant's competitive advantage of owning the network goes, because there are several new and better networks. Don't you think it's going to shake things up?
The purpose of this blog is to track information about residential fiber deployments all around the world, examine issues related to fiber-based services, and hopefully generate discussions and sharing of information on this emerging telecom wave. As I mentioned above, I have been working in telecoms for a decade or so, and fiber has always been part of my day job, but the emergence of FTTH in the last couple of years is of particular interest to me.
I don't pretend to have all the answers. Heck, I'd be happy if I had all the questions. Just to get my biases out in the open, I live in France, so I will probably tend to have a euro-centric view to begin with. Also, I'm a marketer by trade, and while being a marketer in telecom entails a certain level of technological understanding, there are things about fiber that are Chinese to me. Hopefully, these biases will be apparent and non-disruptive!
Still, I hope that by asking pertinent questions (I'll do my best) examining some of the issues surrounding FTTx, sharing resources on the topic and presenting my readers with news - some of them hopefully contributed by other readers - I will help to forward the understanding of this upcoming (r)evolution.
This blog will be organised in seven simple categories (for now):
- Access will explore issues related to the fiber connection itself, the levels of service related to the access, the problematics of deployment, etc.
- Services will explore issues or interrogations related to the Value Added Services bundled with or sold over the fiber access.
- Contents will examine issues related to the selling of content over fiber, VoD, music or otherwise.
- Technology will address any question related to technological choices. I may be weak in that area, but if it affects the product, I want to understand it!
- Expert Opinions will present interviews undertaken with people who know more than myself about fiber, which is to say nearly everyone!
- Resources will point you to websites, blogs, market studies, analysis, etc. that are pertinent when examining Fiber problematics.
- Finally, Fiber News will present brief news about fiber players, services, events, and about this blog itself.
I hope that if the subject matter is of interest to you, you won't hesitate to comment and/or email me about fiberevolution with feedback and suggestions.
