During one of the conference breaks in Lisbon, I had the chance to catch up with Kai Seim who runs Kai Seim & Partners, an active consulting firm in Germany. Kai Seim & Partners issued the “Fibre in Germany” last year that covers broadband infrastructures development in Germany.  A nice read if you haven’t bought [...]

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For the last years, due to probably professional perversion, I have questioned most of (if not all) the assumptions of broadband/NGA/FTTH techno-economic studies.
One thing that never felt entirely right is how we factor population density in cost functions. We use inhabitants per sq. mile/km (area metric) to estimate costs while we express the results (networks [...]

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Hellas on Line, the primary fixed broadband competitor of OTE, the Greek incumbent, announced that it passed the 300,ooo subscribers mark. This figure refers to local loop unbundled connections. The figure is substantial and if you take into account the fast pace by which the company has been connecting customers the last year I am [...]

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On my way to Lisbon and while I waited in Madrid for my transit flight I met with Fransisco Joya, the Strategy Planning Director of Citynet. Fransisco is a cool guy and very much involved in Citynet’s international expansion. He was kind enough to meet with me for a coffee at Plaza de Mayor (the [...]

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Highlights from Lisbon

March 12, 2010

It was the first time I was at the FTTH Council’s conference and it was really an excellent opportunity to get first-hand the pulse of the industry and meet tons of people that I read, hear about or work with yet knew until now only by the looks of their social avatar (Pauline, Kai, Fredrik, [...]

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Will That Be Google’s FTTH Business Model?

February 16, 2010

Unless you have been living under a fat rock for the last couple of weeks you should probably know about Google’s announcement to build an FTTH network. If this still does not ring a bell you can read Benoit or Stephen’s take on the topic.
What has been absent from the enormous news coverage is how [...]

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National Strategies for Ultrabroadband Infrastructure Deployment: Experiences and Challenges

February 8, 2010

I came about this today and I thought you might want to know. WIK Consulting is organizing a 1.5 day event (26-27 April in Berlin) to discuss some of the most debatable topics of the FTTH world:

What are the key objectives, elements and instruments of the different national broadband strategies?
What is the actual role of [...]

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What is the realistic comparison between FTTH and FTTC costs?

January 25, 2010

Last week I read the latest WIK’s consulting report on NGA. The news coverage mentioned that a Germany-wide FTTH deployment would cost 120 billion euros and that an FTTC+VDSL deployment would cost approximately 40 billion euros. The news article did not make clear to the percentage of coverage these figures referred to.
The article ignited the [...]

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On selecting the Consultant for the Greek FTTH Vision

January 17, 2010

The Ministry of Infrastructure released this Friday a public consultation regarding the tender for selecting the national FTTH project’s consultant. The consultant will undertake a techno-economic analysis on the project and will have to provide input to the ministry regarding the proposed business model and plan, sustainability study, sensitivity analysis and so forth.
There are a [...]

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Greek IX traffic slashed down to 30% – torrents closed

December 21, 2009

Last week EPOE, a copyright protection authority pressed charges against the administrators of a Greek owned torrent site (greek-fun.com). After the police arrested one of the owners most of the torrent sites with Greek owners, voluntarily, shutdown (temporarily as it is rumored in the underground scene) resulting in an almost 70% slash to the average [...]

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