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, Carlos, Tony, Magnus, to name only a few)!
Pauline, Carlos and Benoit have already put up their reviews about the event so I could only complement their views with a couple of new things. So, here’s my take-aways from the conference:
The first thing has to do with the remarkable effort of Portugal to position itself as an international FTTH pioneer. The portuguese efforts, found in the spotlight of this year’s conference, round up to the following:
- The public committment of the Portuguese Prime Minister Socrates to offer 100% FTTH coverage in the country by the year
- The serious plans of the PT (Portugal Telecom) to expand their access offerings to FTTH, covering already 1M homes and having deployed 480,0o0 km of cable.
- Zon, the largest cable operator in Portugal shows that 20% of their traffic is made of by video paying services (that’s much more than I’d expected) with P2P accounting for litle above 50%.
The second thing is McKinsey’s observation that regulation is a key driver (I would probably call it an on-off switch in certain cases) when it comes to broadband development. Having said that however, competition plays too often a catalytic role to broadband market development. Take for example PT that is forced to enter the business to compete the market leader, Zon.
Last and not least, Taylor Reynolds from OECD spoke about the catalytic role of Governments and the significant role the public has to play in broadband development, especially due to the social spillovers that are not considered by the private sector’s investment decision process.
No related posts.
