Yesterday, Minister of Communications, Mr. Chatzidakis announced the long awaited national strategy for fiber access networks (see FTTH). Following the examples of Korea, Japan and Sweden, Greece drafted a national strategy for fiber access based on governmental funding and coordination to build a nationwide fiber infrastructure to ensure fiber access to approx. 2M households (That’s about 40% country coverage). The project is budgeted at 2.1bn euros.
The project’s main attributes as are announced at this stage are:
- Creation of an Open Access network for telecommunications and digital service providers
- User connections will be at least 100Mbps
- The network will provide Dark Fiber services based on the passive infrastructure model
- Management will be granted to private partners on a PPP basis for 30 years
- Project’s time of completion: 7 years
- Project wil include Athens, Thessaloniki and the 50 biggest cities of the country
- To speed up the execution, the project will be separated in 3, each part covering a distinct geographical area of the country by a different PPP
Government will provide funding and subsidies, update the legislation and regulation framework and define technical specifications.
Clearly, there are many implementation and coordination issues to be clarified and worked out but while things are progressing let us all enjoy the momentum and prospects!
You can watch, also in Greek, the ministerial presentation below:
Download the Presentation of Hellenic Optical Infrastructure Project from Slideshare.com.
or watch it online from google/docs:
