It is one of the standard questions that Asia Pacific ultrafast broadband operators get asked: What on earth are you going to do with the huge bandwidth on these 1Gbps FTTH services?
In the past few weeks, as I’ve attended Broadband World Forum Asia in Hong Kong and then traveled around the region talking to operators and vendors about superfast broadband, some answers have become clearer.
First, in Hong Kong, two of the region’s leading broadband operators, Korea Telecom and Japanese operator NTT West, outlined how they were aiming to get a return on the huge investments they had made in their FTTH networks.
Put simply, both operators say that there is still no “killer app” for FTTH and that they will use the huge amount of bandwidth they have available to launch a broad range of digital content services.
This strategy was amusingly referred to as the “salami effect” by Huawei fixed-broadband executives at the company’s Global Analyst Summit in Shenzhen last week, because it is as if the operators are slicing up their content – the “salami” – into small pieces, rather than focusing on a single application, such as HD video or videoconferencing, though KT’s and NTT West’s strategies in doing so are substantially different.
The great partner grab
For NTT West, a slowing domestic FTTH market – partly caused by the huge popularity of LTE services – means the company has had to concede that although it owns the broadband pipe, it cannot be all things to all people and needs external partners, including OTT players.