Crawling under fiber news...

It's a tough blogger's life when two eminent analysts with too much time on their hands blog on similar topics. You end up referring to their analysis more often than producing your own. And these last few days, in between tons of work and many personal interrogations, I haven't exactly kept abreast fo the news.

So, in order to save time and rendre à César as we say in French, check out Tim's excellent post on the latest BSG report on FTTH costs, Telefonica, KPN, Muni-projects and many more recent fiber news. James posts about actual (ie. measured) internet usage and draws some interesting conclusions here. I have strong reason to believe that an in-depth analysis of exact levels of broadband available in various countries will be made available in the very near future. I'll talk more about it once it's public, but in the meantime James states loud what everyone thinks quietly: that the true bandwidth level available to people in most western countries are leagues away from what people (and policy makers) think they get...

There are a few things that my fellow bloggers haven't commented on yet, so let me be the first (hopefully)

• In Spain, Orange is furious of the CMT's decision not to require of Telefonica to offer bitstream or unbundling. Isn't that going to complicate their position in France, where to be fair they're not exactly excited about concepts such as unbundling or interoperability ?
• Orange in France has admitted being very late in its deployment plans. Design or difficulties? Probably the former. Orange said that regulatory uncertainties delayed the mass investment decision. Could this be a subtle ploy by ARCEP to give Orange's competitors a head start?
• Players involved in Amsterdam Citynet are to trial 1Gbps service in the coming weeks. It's not a worldwide first (HKBN in Hong Kong and BB2 in Lünd offer this) but it's a milestone for Amsterdam and attracts heavy attention from Om Malik who despairs at the US situation.
• I had somehow missed Chris Marsden excellent blog on ICT and regulation called Net Neutrality in Europe. Blogrolled.

Tim's posting suggests that a heavy fiber map update is needed, but I won't be able to do it today. In the coming days I intend to talk about Greece, Copyright and Warfare and hopefully put up a little poll for you to participate in (it's all the rage, these days!)