|
|
|
Asia-Pacific will have 100m FTTH homes by year-end |
|
Asia-Pacific will have 100m FTTH homes by year-end By Mary Lennighan, Total Telecom, in Singapore Friday 20 June 2014 FTTH Council Asia Pacific's new president says the region's fibre connections are growing fast, but operators still face some 'real-world challenges'. 100 million households in the Asia-Pacific region will have a fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) connection by the end of this year, one industry body predicts. The region was home to 92.7 million FTTH subscriptions at the end of 2013 and is adding new ones at a rate of 1,563 per hour, Bernard Lee, the newly-elected president of the FTTH Council Asia Pacific, said at CommunicAsia on Thursday. Asia-Pacific is on track to reach 100 million connections, he said. "Wait for an announcement. It should be in Q4 this year." "There's a significant migration from copper to fibre going on right now," he said, noting that during 2013 the region saw its total number of copper lines fall by 7.12 million. "Copper is reaching its limits," Lee said. There are a number of factors driving the FTTH market, not least of which is the participation of governments in rolling out national broadband network infrastructure. The likes of Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand and Australia have all adopted different national broadband models, but in all cases the state is involved. National broadband projects in the region amount to spending of US$60 billion, Lee said. Another major driver is the mobile market and the growing demand for LTE backhaul. "The only medium that can give you that kind of bandwidth is fibre," Lee said. There are doubtless those that disagree. A conference session later in the day examined the backhaul market and the consensus was that with LTE networks requiring denser urban deployments and a greater number of small cells, a mixture of technologies will come into play for backhauling traffic. Nonetheless, fibre will certainly be used to connect up a sizeable number of LTE cell sites. There are also some major challenges operators face when rolling out fibre in the Asia-Pacific, including difficulties they face in the physical act of getting the fibre into the ground and connected up. While labour in the region is for the most part cheaper than it is in the West, inexperienced contractors can take a lot of time – and thereby money – to install fibre, Lee warned. Contractors have to learn how to handle the medium,
|
|
|
|
Products & Solutions 
