The high bandwidth required by TV continues to be the “killer application” for FTTH. The 3DTV demonstration by Olleh KT and the South Korean cable television operator CJ HelloVision were of high quality helping pave the way for high acceptance.
And NTT’s Next Generation Services Joint Development Forum serves as an example to nurturing emerging services and support fast tracking them to commercialization. The Forum is an incubator for marketing and technology consulting. It provides NGN test beds, value added interfaces, and supports the development of new services on its network.
These FTTH developed regions, including Singapore are also increasing data rates to 1 Gbps per subscriber.
Cost remains the biggest challenge for anyone to deploy FTTH. Sharing a network can help and providing an open platform may create an innovative business environment. Australia’s National Broadband Network serves as one example that will be examined closely as it emerges.
The government targets serving 90% of its population notwithstanding the fact that it is more geographically dispersed than Japan or South Korea thereby making fiber deployment expensive.
Furthermore it is challenged with building a cooperative relationship with the Telstra, the leading incumbent telecom operator.
Nonetheless, the government appears intent of building one FTTH network. The current proposal is that the network operator can only offer wholesale services. Competition is proposed for providers to deliver services above layer 2 presenting what appears to be a favorable situation for end-user service providers. But a challenge for this model is managing stacked margins so services are cost competitive for end-users.
New Zealand and Singapore are also pushing structural separation models and it is being recommended in France.