The last year has seen some important developments in the FTTH scene in Europe, said Chris Holden, president of the FTTH Council Europe, in his opening speech at the FTTH Conference in Milan.
The first, of course, is the publication of the Digital Agenda, which sets ambitious targets of 100Mbps connectivity for 50 percent of Europe's citizens and 30Mbps for everyone. Now that the Digital Agenda has been released, it is up to individual countries as to what measures they take to achieve the objectives.
Explicit in the Digital Agenda is the recognition that fiber is the ideal technology to meet this bandwidth demand, Holden claimed. FTTH is firmly in the forefront of people's minds when they think about Internet connectivity.
This policy goal has helped contribute subtle but fundamental shift in the questions that the FTTH Council Europe is being asked by people with an interest in fiber-to-the-home, said Holden. The question is not simply "why fiber?" but "how fiber?"
But Holden warned that we should not underestimate the difficulties in fulfilling the targets of the Digital Agenda. "Our networks are at a crossroads," he said. "We can go in several different directions but only fiber guarantees the infrastructure of the future.
The other directions could lead to stranded investment or worse still, there may be no funding available in the future, and we could end up in a situation where we continue to have haves and have-nots."
Wireless networks are not a separate technology path, Holden claims. The Council believes that wired and wireless networks go hand in hand. A future without mobile is unthinkable, but that future also depends on fiber to connect high-capacity base stations.
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