Last Week’s Picks
After announcing that is dumping its GPON business, NSN has fired against GPON at the Broadband World Forum Europe 2008 . According to company’s officials 1) VDSL technology has the qualities to directly compete with GPON and 2) by the time fiber becomes a mass market product (within a 5 years time frame) WDM-PON will be mature and cheap enough to dominate the market. At the same day, Nortel also announced its first European customer of WDM-PON products, the dutch operator UNET BV. (WDM-PON is a PON technology that multiplexes wavelengths the same way “traditional” PON technologies multiplex fibers. With WDM-PON you can get a point-to-multipoint physical layer but a point-to-point architecture at the logical layer).
If you thought that no alternative operator would object in a structural separation of incumbent’s fixed network think again, you’re wrong! Fastweb alleges that Telecom Italia’s fixed network spin-off will provide financial benefits to the incumbent alone (by tranfering some of its debts to the new company) and will hurt competition by necessitating unbundling prices increase to cover extensive costs. On the other hand, Tiscali favours Telecom Italia’s structural separation finding it to be the best way forward to keep the market open and ensure equal access to competitors.
Chinese government ordered its three domestic telecom operators China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom to share and co-build infrastructure to avoid repeat construction in the wake of industry restructuring. All three operators offer both fixed line and mobile services. The operators will be allwed 10 working days to inform on their infrastructure availability if a rival shows interest in an area that they are already present. They will also be banned from building at the same sites and routes within three years if they show no need for co-construction! It is expected that China Mobile will benefit less than its rivals. China Mobile has more than 400 million mobile phone users, more than triple that of China Unicom. China Telecom has about 43 million wireless subscribers after acquiring the CDMA assets from China Unicom.
And for those who favour alternative energy production here’s some good news. Voltree Power has developed a technology capable of harnessing the small voltage that results from the difference in PH between the tree and the ground to produce energy. The company claims to have generated sufficient electricity from the technology to power a wireless network of thousands of tiny humidity and temperature sensor nodes that can be distributed throughout forests to form an early wildfire warning system!
