The news items keep piling up in the aftermath of BT's announcement this Wednesday. Yesterday ZDNet published an article about O2 expressing an interest in rolling out fiber themselves if the regulatory environment was right. The article says fiber to the home (which is different from what BT is doing) but of course it's better to wait for official announcements to know what exactly they would consider.
This is interesting in two respects though. The first one is that various analysts of the UK market recently said that no one apart from Openreach could be seen deploying fiber to the home, I'm not sure that's quite as certain today.
The second, and perhaps more interesting point is that HSPA, and LTE down the line, are going to require some serious fiber backhaul from the basestations, which in dense urban areas means quite a bit of fiber. If you're going to go to the pain of rolling that out, you might as well connect the customers around it, especially if, as O2 in the UK, you're already branching out into fixed services in addition to your core mobile roots...
Of course, O2 could also leverage the expertise that is currently being developed in Spain by Telefonica for their own FTTH rollouts.
