2021.08.27 – Open Broadband News

The high-speed home! The evolving role of customer-premises equipment

Following an annual survey, it was found that some providers want to shift the customer-premises equipment (CPE) workload to the cloud, while others think the Smart Home and the Internet of Things (IoT) mean a continuing demand for a sophisticated home gateway. EuroMedia Magazine spoke to a range of industry practitioners to define the role of CPE, including Broadband Forum’s Vice President of Strategic Marketing and Business Development Craig Thomas.

Questions asked on CPE included the impact of lockdown and home-working on home connectivity, the importance and future of voice control in CPE, and what the right balance between Cloud and on-premises approaches is, in order to maximize the value for service providers and their customers?

Answering the first question, Craig said: “Another acceleration that extended periods of lockdown has created is the recognition that there are multiple customers across a single broadband connection. The homeworker’s employer, IoT providers, public services including eHealth as well as traditional residential services. The monetization but also delivery of multiple services with multiple Quality of Experience (QoE) needs is increasing the demand for more intelligent broadband gateways and CPE that securely containerize additional services per home or business. Leading to the opportunity to pick and choose new broadband services and applications.”

Read the full article in EuroMedia Magazine’s July-August edition on pages 10-16 here.

Bargains aplenty! Low-priced broadband plans hit record high in Q2

The percentage of Americans with access to low-priced broadband – defined as plans costing $60 per month or less – reached a record high in the second quarter of 2021, according to a new study from BroadbandNow. Some 87% of Americans now have access to such plans, up from 77% in Q1 2021, the firm found in the study, ‘The State of Broadband in America, Q2 2021.’

That massive jump in access to affordable broadband plans in Q2 2021 is also up from a mere 51% in the year-ago period. “The nationwide focus on the digital divide is driving results” BroadbandNow’s Editor-in-Chief Tyler Cooper said in a statement.

Among other findings, just 34% of Americans had access to low-priced speeds for tiers delivering in the neighbourhood of 100Mbit/s down and 25Mbit/s up in Q2 2021, but that still represented an 11% improvement from the previous quarter.

Welsh Government set targets for gigabit broadband ISP takeover!

The Welsh Government has launched a new Open Market Review (OMR) for Wales, which aims to identify any existing or planned commercial coverage of gigabit broadband ISP networks. The review will help to establish the areas where public investment may be needed to deploy the service.

At present, the UK Government’s new £5 billion Project Gigabit programme aims to ensure that a minimum of 85% of UK premises can access a gigabit-capable connection by the end of 2025. The effort for this will be targeted at the final 20% of premises (the hardest to reach rural and some sub-urban areas), where commercial investment models tend to fail.

Commercial rollouts alone could push gigabit coverage to more than 60% of UK premises by the end of 2021 and more than 80% by the end of 2025. The current UK figure is 42%, and 30% for Wales.

Several new telecom laws in Cuba hone in on nationwide broadband coverage

The Cuban Ministry of Communications (Mincom) has officially implemented several new laws concerning the country’s telecoms sector. The most significant of these is perhaps the ‘Decree-Law No. 35 on Telecommunications’, ‘Information and Communication Technologies’ and the ‘Use of the Radioelectric Spectrum’, which is the country’s first all-encompassing telecoms law.

The new legislation pushes for the expansion of broadband networks while enshrining consumer protections. The Mincom stated that the new law will “contribute to the political, economic and social development of the country, through the development and modernization of telecoms infrastructures and, furthermore, promote the harmonious and orderly progress of telecoms/ICT networks and services.”

Report reveals that LTE and 5G drive microwave transmission demand

According to a report from Dell’Oro Group, a source for market information about the telecommunications and networks industries, demand for Microwave Transmission equipment grew 11 percent year-on-year in the first half of 2021 driven by LTE and 5G. In that period, microwave revenue from mobile backhaul application grew 16 percent.

All regions contributed to the positive market growth this quarter with the exception of Latin America. Latin America declined year-on-year for a ninth consecutive quarter, shrinking to its lowest quarterly revenue level.

“The Microwave Transmission market is recovering from the decline caused by the spread of Covid-19 as evidenced by the strong growth in the first half of 2021,” stated Vice President at Dell’Oro Group, Jimmy Yu. “Almost all of the vendors in this industry are benefiting from the improving mobile backhaul market, especially the top vendors. Since demand is rising, each vendor’s performance this year will come down to how well they navigate the supply issues created by the pandemic and semiconductor shortages.”