One year ago, at the FTTH Conference 2011 in Milan, there was great excitement about how the new Digital Agenda targets could catalyse the market for fibre to the home (FTTH).
The target for availability called for every citizen in Europe to have access to 30Mbps broadband by 2020. The target around uptake was even more ambitious: the European Commission wanted half of all subscribers to be taking 100Mbps services by 2020. As Chris Holden, president of the FTTH Council Europe, pointed out at the time, such a high penetration would require almost ubiquitous availability of 100Mbps services – something that FTTH is well placed to deliver.
So how are things looking one year later?
This is the intro to my first guest post for ADVA Optical Networking, so you’ll need to pop over there to read the rest of it.
Its a great post, but very similar to what came out of the FTTH Council Europe last year. Nothing much has changed and the UK is still being held to ransom by the copper cabal sweating their assets.
You’re right, the “Europe needs to hurry up” message is the same. It’s a shame – more than a shame really – that things haven’t improved over the last year. It looks like there is progress in the way that European policy makers are thinking about the financing and business models, but it seems like it will take quite a while for this to have an effect at country level. Still it’s good to have a target that leads people in the right direction.