You'll have to excuse my brevity since I'm on the road and posting through the (less than adequate) typepad website on the ipad (half of which is flash, of course...) but since I left France there's been an avalanche of Fiber related news. Here's a quick summary of the relevant stuff:
Australia has a new government, and it's labour (http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/09/07/3005179.htm). That means that the NBN plans proceed for a few more years and - most likely - to a point where they can't easily be reversed. Here's hoping that labour understands that they need to tighten up their game on this issue at least and start acting more decisively.
KPN in the Netherlands got violently slammed for their fiber product in a consumer advocacy TV show. Rudolf over at Internet Thought has the complete low-down (http://internetthought.blogspot.com/2010/09/kpn-fiber-receives-death-blow-and.html). According to him, it's a mix of truths and half-truths, but the blow to KPN's image and FTTH in general is potentially severe. Reggefiber, as Rudolf says, must be fuming... Incidentally, a similar trend was noted in France last week when a tech website published performance results for FTTH connections. The best delivered a little over half the nominal, the worse around a third. If the telcos don't understand that they need to deliver 100% or more of the nominal on these products, they're toast!
Finally, UK research firm Analysis Mason yesterday released a report urging service providers not to deploy FTTH anytime soon, arguing that take-up was low, service revenues not high enough and the bandwidth offered unnecessary. They also argue that wireless will capture most of the future spend, convienciently forgetting that traffoc offload is a crucial roadblock in the wireless path to prevalence. In other words, a classic case of 'don't plan ahead' and a condemnation of a technology with very little attention to the impact of execution on the poor metrics they cite. A statement I would be willing to back would be: "if you intend to do FTTH in a 'business as usual' way, don't bother..." Maybe Analysis Mason thinks that's a bit too subtle for most incumbents!
