Fiberevolution

The replay for the FTTH Benefits for Real-Estate Webinar is up on Vimeo. You can find it here:

Video Webinar 18 April 2013 – The Positive Effects of FTTH for Real Estate Projects from paftthcouncileu on Vimeo.

I’ve also uploaded the slides on slideshare if you’re interested, they’re here.

Last week I received the FTTH Council Europe Indivudual Award for outstanding contribution to the Industry (in case you didn’t already know) so to celebrate the occasion I decided to put all of our previously released reports at half-price or more for the next two weeks. You can find details on the operation here.

Here are the reports affected by the promotion:

• The Dynamics of Public Private Collaboration in Next-Generation Access Infrastructure
• Can the New Zealand NGA Model be Replicated?
• Will Video Kill the Cloud Star?
• Do data caps punish the wrong users? A bandwidth usage reality check
• Latency will make or break the cloud economy
• The Rise and Fall of Dong Energy’s Fibernett
• The virtues and limitations of FTTP franchise models
• Understanding the Cable Threat
• The Gigabit Race is On!
• Lessons from the Australian NBN
• Net discrimination won’t buy you next-generation access
• Timing The Infrastructure Investment in Next-Generation Access Networks
• Money talks, but what does it say? Examining the EIB’s loan activity for fibre projects
• TV 2.0 is an opportunity for telcos to be at the heart of content delivery
• Home management and service enablement: a winning combination
• Should City Cats Be The First To Play With The Fiber Yarn?
• Hong Kong’s City Telecom has the recipe to spin glass into gold

I hope you will help me spread the word!

Rainbow Fiber Paths (CC-BY-NC-SA Ben Felten)

We’re only a week into 2013 and already there’s more topics to cover than I can conceivably talk about. And I’m not even attending CES!!!

So we’ll be talking about many things this week, between Free’s crazy attempt at arm-wrestling Google, Israel’s electricity company going forward with national FTTH plans and Cisco finally dropping the gorgeously doomed Umi.

Meanwhile, I wanted to point you to Diffraction Analysis’ new year post, which highlights some of the things you can expect from the company in the first few months of the year.

I wanted to give you a little present as well.

On the personal side of my life last year, I worked a lot on my photography skills, and one of the things I always wanted to be able to shoot well was Fiber Optic Lights. I’ve gotten decent at it (I think), and I thought I’d share the joy around by releasing 42 of my best Fiber Optic shots as Creative Commons photos. These photos are all CC-BY-NC-SA which means in a nutshell that you can alter them as long as you reshare them, and you can use them in any non-commercial context which (in my book) includes blogging and powerpoint presentations. I hope it’s useful to you all. The individual photos can all be found here, but to make life easy for everyone, I set them all up in a pinboard so you can pick and choose.

If you want to use the photos in a commercial context, please get in touch.

Also, they can all be purchased as prints which I’m sure would look great in any FTTx exec’s office!

Happy New Year to you all, here’s hoping we’ll meet face to face!

An article in Wired Business written by Susan Crawford and published on Oct. 2nd (entitled We Can’t All Be in Google’s Kansas: A Plan for Winning the Bandwidth Race) mentions Diffraction Analysis’ New Zealand study and highlights the positive aspects of the New Zealand NGA model. Most importantly, Susan Crawford points to the core differentiator of the NZ model: that public money should alleviate the deployment risks, particularly take-up risk. Our report is still available for purchase!

Stokab has become one of these landmark municipal broadband projects that many people quote and talk about but that until now had never really been studied in depth. A few months ago, Google approached us and asked if we would undertake such a study with their sponshorship and publish the results. The ideas was not to present the project as anything it isn’t and neither was it to push for its replication, the idea was to look dispassionately at how Stokab got where it is, the benefits that the City of Stockholm derives from Stokab and to examine how the project might realistically be replicated and by whom.

The paper, entitled Stockholm’s Stokab: A Blueprint for Ubiquitous Fiber Connectivity? is now available on SSRN. It’s an in-depth 15 page read and examines all the issues above and more. In particular, it highlights the financial aspects of the Stokab story: where did the money come from, how did the structure fare in the early years, etc. In case that wasn’t made clear, it’s available to all who want to download it. I would be very curious to have feedback from people interested in discussing its contents.

The replay for the webinar Benoît Felten led for the FTTH Council Europe on Service Strategies in May is available on replay on Vimeo.

It’s embedded here. It contains a number of key data points for network providers looking at FTTH investment and policy makers wanting to unravel fact from propaganda.

Freedom to Connect is a unique event in technology. The speakers there are just not the usual bunch of speakers, a mix of long-term visionaries and disruptive entrepreneurs. I felt a little pedestrian myself amongst that crowd, but I console myself by thinking that as exciting as vision and disruption are, occasionally you need down-to-earth pragmatism as well. 

Anyway, my presentation (and all the other ones too) is on youtube. Mine talks about the emergence of superfast broadband around the world, the looming issue in broadband quality of experience, the essential failure of broadband policy and some recommended solutions. 

(Caveat: I was jetlagged, and it took me a while to find my stride, so the end of the presentation is somewhat rushed, for which I apologise).

In two weeks time on June 1st, my excellent ex-colleague Wally Swain and I will be running a one-day workshop on NGA business models in Bogota, Colombia, on the backend of the ACIEM Telecom Conference.

The purpose of the workshop is to share our knowledge on NGA business models in general and on Latin American opportunities in particular. Topics covered will include: 

Session 1: Next Generation Access Dynamics

• Next Generation Access Deployment Around the World will offer an overview of FTTx deployment around the world and assess the main lessons learned from these various experiences. Many of these will be examined in more detail later during the day.

• Drivers to NGA are important to understand the incentives for different types of players to enter the NGA field. While some drivers may be universal (appeal for quality business services, increase in bandwidth demand, etc.) they affect different players in different ways.

• NGA in Latin America will present and analyze initiatives in Next-Generation Access in Latin America, look at trends and commonalities and attempt to anticipate how the wireline market will play out in light of these emerging approaches.

Session 2: The Specificities of NGA Business Models

• Business Model Basics will look into the core cost and revenue constituents of an FTTx business model and examine the implications of these large masses on the economics of offering FTTx services.

• Alternative Business Models and Optimization Strategies will explore alternative approaches to building the business model, including FTTC vs. FTTx comparisons, co-investment approaches and wholesale models. It will also present proven strategies to enhance the core business model components and their impact on return on investment.

• Implications of NGA regulation will examine regulatory frameworks to NGA investment and their potential implications on business models.

Session 3: Technology, Marketing and Services

• The impact of technology choices on business models essentially lies in two areas: cost optimization and service or evolution limitations. The different approaches and their implications will be presented and evaluated.

• Go-To-Market and Service Strategies are often more important to profitability of FTTx approaches than technical choices. The go-to-market approach to get customers to switch platforms are very different from what is commonly used in mobile or broadband. Services act both as vectors for attractiveness (thus getting customers to switch) and revenue generating units. Bothe these aspects will be examined in this section.

More details and registration information can be found at http://www.seminario-nga.com.

In late 2011, Diffraction Analysis undertook a study of 13 FTTH operators for the FTTH Council Europe to determine optimal approaches to service strategies. The results were presented at the FTTH Council Europe Conference in Munich in February. Next week, I will be leading a webinar organised by the Council to present the results to a wider audience. Here are the details:

Webinar Title: Successful Service Strategies for FTTH Operators

Content:  The biggest challenge for service providers contemplating FTTH deployment is choosing between an acquisition strategy (to maximise customer adoption) and a service strategy (to maximise value-added revenues).

Towards the end of 2011, Diffraction Analysis undertook an extensive analysis of 13 FTTH service providers across Europe to understand and articulate how service providers are addressing this issue and how the strategic orientations translate in terms of service portfolios and service innovation. In this webinar the results of this study will be presented.

Presenter: Benoît Felten. Benoît Felten is the CEO of Diffraction Analysis. With 15 years experience in telecoms, including 10 as a consultant and analyst, he has focused in the last 5 years on FTTH and the opportunities it represents to reshape the telecoms industry. He is also an active blogger on http://www.fiberevolution.com and presents on twitter as @fiberguy.

Details: Date: 15 May 2012 / Time: 11:00-12:00 CEST

To join the webinar you just need a PC with an Internet connection.

Please register using this link.

In case you missed it, here's an opinion piece I posted on the Diffraction Analysis blog last week, about the relative cost of FTTH and why it's (in my opinion) generally not apprehended in the right way. It's called FTTH is (relatively) cheap.