In between my current workload and the subtitles of the Free videos, not much time to comment on other news. Tim has a post from late last week with some of the recent fiber news, so I won't comment on these except to say that the FiOS figures on energy comsumption are both impressive and dissapointing. Impressive because it's real, but dissapointing because it's still about twice as much as what GPON vendors advertise for (Vendors often mention 1/5 or 20%).
In addition to these bits of news:
- Earlier this month a French journalist from online newspaper Rue 89 explained how Orange or one of its subcontractors had cabled up the building he lives in despite no authorisation by the association of owners. The article entitled Comment Orange m'a Condamné au Câblage Forcé is pretty frightening when you think of the backhand dealings that must going on in the race/war to fiber up buildings in Paris...
- Also in France, SFR is threatening to slow down its fiber investment if the regulator doesn't lower the price of unbundling. Strange, as that would further undermine the business plan for fiber. And isn't this the company whose main shareholder thinks fiber is useless and only a further encouragement for content piracy?
- In Slovenia, T-Com, Deutsche Telekom's subsidiary has announced an FTTH deployment using Huawei's GPON. This is in the face of Orange's own FTTH deployment which has been ongoing for 18 months. There's an estimated 20k FTTH customers in Slovakia (Idate).
- The US City of Seattle, it seems, has not foregone the idea of deloying its own FTTH network. Seems to be ongoing debate as to whether it should be a privately owned, publicly subsidised network or a publicly owned network according to a piece from the Seattle Times (Privately Owned Broadband For City Moving Ahead). My comment to the Mayor and Council would be that privately owned does not mean monopoly on services, but maybe they know that already and the article is slightly misleading...
