The seminar is planned for next weekend 9-12/7/2009. Should you be interested, here’s the full program, and note that registration is free.

I look forward to spend a weekend in the middle of the Aegean, surrounded by crystal seas and the blue sky with pleasant breezes of municipal NGA influxes… ‘nough said, I go pack my bags!

The authors, Sabine Finke and Kai Seim, provide an overview of FTTH activity in Germany and enough details to keep you busy especially if you are not so familiar with the German market, like I was. The study is priced at less than 50 euros and you can get information on how to obtain it at  Seim & Partners website or at Kai’s blog.

The authors plan for a second edition of the report at the end of 2009 with updated information for existing and new projects. I do look forward to see this publication turning into a yearly report on the German FTTH market.

There are two topics I look forward to see reported in more detail in the upcoming edition of the report: a) business models and b) ownership structure. Yet, I understand this may be a little more to ask, especially with the market being so young. Overall I find the study a good money for value proposition and an excellent resource for understanding the current status and dynamics of the German FTTH market.

In my view two things clearly stand out in the study:

1. On the demand-side, payback is much more sensitive to take-up rates than it is to ARPU and
2. On the supply-side, payback is highly sensitive to the cost per homes connected

These two observations  clearly imply that:

1. Telcos rolling out FTTH must secure high take-up rates in the short-term, and opening the networks to competing service providers can ensure higher use of the infrastructure; thus shorter payback (ARPU is not as important as take-up rates are) and
2. Telcos rolling out FTTH need to explore all available options to reduce the cost of deployment. Although state subsidies may be one way for doing so, partnering with the public sector (utilities or municipalities) and synchronizing construction with public civil works (I wonder how possible this might be) is the safest, and socially optimal, way to ensure the lowest possible cost per home passed/connected.

Overall, the study is clearly a mind-opener and provides insight to the economics of Open Access models. As always, Benoit gives the right push for innovative thinking to all NGA stakeholders (especially those with the capacity to rollout FTTH networks, i.e. the incumbents and big telcos). I highly recommend reading it forward and backwards!

I am happy to announce that Broadband Prime has moved to a dotcom domain. After being hosted for more than a year on blogspot.com and wordpress.com I finally settled to http://www.broadbandprime.com/

I planned to move the blog since the beginning of the year. Until recently this plan was simply my pet project; when I had time I was looking into it to ensure the transition could be made effectively. I would probably be going on for a couple more years, most likely, if I didn’t place it on “blog” priority 1 for the last 10 days.

So, Broadband Prime has finally moved. It wasn’t that easy and I had to do a lot of tweaking to bring the blog to its current format. The blog is running on wordpress 2.8. There are simply no words to describe precisely the functionality of the platform, the wide user community and the variety of plugins and addons available out there. All permalinks of broadbandprime.blogspot.com are preserved, so all your existing links to the blog’s content will keep working as they are (that was probably the most difficult part of the transition). The feed is also operational with no need for additional action from your side (if you are subscribed to the feedburner feed: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/BroadbandPrime or http://feeds.feedburner.com/BroadbandPrime).  However, if you run into troubles please let me know and I will fix it ASAP.

A few things about the new UI of the blog. I have redefined the categorization of the content to make it easier for you to follow-up, and I have also changed the landing page. Instead of throwing a list of the most recent posts you now have all the content categorized at your disposal. I do hope you will find this more useful, at least I do.

The categories of the blog are the following:

1. Access: Addresses issues relating to access networks, technologies, architectures, business models etc.
2. Muni/Broadband: Covers municipal initiatives and issues relating to local authorities involvement in broadband infrastructures.
3. Reviews: This includes weekly reviews, roundups, conference’s reviews, studies and analysis reports.
4. Greece: This is a special horizontal category to incorporate all posts covering developments related to Greece.
5. Green: Points to content relating to sustainability and environmental impact of broadband (nothing much there yet but is is a topic of great interest for this blog).
6. Government: This category involves coverage on national broadband strategies, national broadband plans and most of the content dealing with regulation and policy if it does not fall to another category.
7. Services: Services deal with any type of services and content that run on NGN (everything above layer 3 of the broadband market as described here )
8. Expert Insight: This category will include primarily interviews conducted by me with experts and field specialists. It will also include pointers to other bloggers and/or experts opinions that I comment or refer to.
9. AOB (Any Other Business): Finally, this category will incorporate topics that do not fall to any of the previous categories. I have already created a subcategory which I named Site Anouncements.

Whatsoever, if you still prefer the old format you can always go to the site’s footer and click on “The Blog”.

Of course there are a bunch of things left to do:

• Finishe off the content’s categorization
• Solve a couple of bugs in UI (not that important to stall the launch)
• Several minor improvements

Many thanks to zuka, pupa and blade for their help during the implementation of the site and special thanks to techies.gr for their support and inspiration throughout the whole gig. If you ever need to hire someone for your web project give them a call. They own the business!

As always, I look forward to your impressions, suggestions and comments on how to make this blog better, more effective and useful to you. See you on the boards!

Comments on the structural separation of Telstra: Dominic Hebert at BuddeComm discusses the prospects of a potential structural separation of Telstra’s business. It takes a different perspective from what usually the proponents of structural separation prefer: the corporation’s share value. A good read.

AT&T, Verizon offer national broadband policy suggestions: A short and to the point piece by Stephen Hardy of Lightwave summarizing AT&T’s and Verizon’s suggestions to FCC regarding US national broadband strategy.

Broadband and the Economy (pdf): This OECD report examines the way in which broadband networks interact with the economy, the role they play in creating the conditions for sustainable economic growth and prosperity, and the structural changes they enable. Emphasis is put on the economic impacts, in particular on growth, globalisation and employment. The report summarizes on the ministerial committee meeting held in Seoul last year.

Shaping Policies for the Future of the Internet Economy (pdf): This OECD report highlights ways to encourage the development of the Internet economy. It looks first at the infrastructure on which its development relies and the need to strengthen and extend broadband networks. It considers the ways in which the Internet already contributes to social and economic goals. It looks to how the Internet can act as a catalyst to further these goals through policies that facilitate convergence, stimulate creativity, strengthen confidence and expand the opportunities for global economic, social and cultural development. The report summarizes on the ministerial committee meeting held in Seoul last year.

Broadband, broadband access to be exact, is a very subjective term, primarily due to that it is mainly a marketing term. It refers to the use of a wider range of frequencies that allow higher speeds toward the end-user. The range of frequencies and the effectiveness of use is directly linked to the achievable speeds. It is worth noting that broadband comes as the “evolution” of other terms used before (narrowband, baseband, wideband).

Simply put, the perception of broadband is directly linked to the level of functionality provided by an access connection to the end user. In any given time period, as application and service markets develop more bandwidth is required to do a standard set of functions. That means that the level of speed that characterizes a connection as broadband a) varies by cultures, markets and countries and b) increases over time. This makes the definition of broadband (speed-wise) a moving target, both in the local and in the global context.

Accordingly, any attempt to incorporate a level of speed (e.g. 1Mbps, 10Mbps, 100Mbps) to the definition of broadband is doomed to fail. For successful implementation of broadband policies we need a more relaxed definition that will qualitatively describe what we consider a broadband connection should do for the end-users. The definition has to refer to the functionality that is expected from a “so-called” broadband connection. A speed may be attached to the definition to facilitate short-term action plans, however, this figure will have to be subject to a review/renewal process in predetermined intervals.

In late 2008, the e-inclusion awards were established for the first time by the European Commision to recognise excellence and good practice in using ICT and digital technology to tackle social and digital exclusion across Europe.

The Greeks got home with the Inclusive Public Services Award for a pilot e-health project run by Sotiria Hospital. The project enables doctors and practitioners to monitor the patients’ condition remotely. The results so far indicate:

• 28% of patients have reported a far better quality of life
• Hospital readmission rates and lengths of stay have fallen by more than 60%
• Emergency room visits have been reduced by 40%
• 60% savings have been achieved through fewer hospitalisations.

The people involved are planning ways to scale the pilot on a national scale. This is quite impressive and received moderate promotion even by the local media. Europa.eu has recently published a video about the project that you can watch here.

You may recall that a similar political trend formed back in the 80s when the first environmental impacts of economic growth affected our quality of life (most important impact being the acid rain in the industrialized countries of the central Europe). However, the political colouring of the environmental movement of that time was absorbed by the political system as soon as the existing political parties adopted environmental policies in their programs. Of course, this may also happen today.

Nevertheless, we should admit the fact that sustainable, environmental friendly growth is a serious alternative that gains awareness throughout the continent, and may simply show the way ahead for the ICT industry.

Future FTTH network should be buried, and shouldn’t be PON: Stuart Corner writes on ITWire and discusses the deployment options (burried vs. aerial) and architectural options (PON vs. Poiont-to-Point) of FTTH. The latter I think it’s pretty much covered by a significant body of literature and press. As far as the first point is concerned though, the article suggests that aerial deployment, although cheaper, exhibits significant operational costs related to increased ratio of failures due to open exposure of the infrastructure. For what is worth, I might add that aerial fiber also reduces quality of living in the area of deployment.

The Impacts of Policy and Regulation on FTTH deployments (pdf): Stephen points to an excellent presentation by Stefan Keller-Tuberg, Chair, Regulation and Policy Committee, FTTH Council Asia-Pacific. The presentation reports on input provided by Ovum and discusses the challenges of a goverment-led nationwide FTTH deployment. Yes, Australia is the point of reference.

FTTH Networks: No Sure Bet: I find the title as it is slightly misleading. The article briefly reports on the importance of planning and design and the need to considered idiosyncracies of different markets and cultures for FTTH success.

Roads vs. FTTH: When discussing FTTH investments it is good to see things in the appropriate perspective. Think for a minute how many Kms of road you have to spare to deploy FTTH to a certain area of choice. For relatively small countries, the dilemma is eventually whether we choose to build a bridge, upgrade a port or light up an entire country.

Broadband Stimulus as the “Next Telecom Boom”? …We Hope Not: The article discusses previous US experiences of markets booms and busts and attempts some guidelines to avoid another bust of the telecom sector following the stumulus dollars

Yesterday I came across another report, coming from Australia this time, which estimates the added value of a fiber access to $5000. Read about it at itwire.com.