2022.02.04 – Open Broadband News

PON appétit! PON, cable broadband, fixed wireless CPE spending to reach $95B by 2026

According to a newly published report by Dell’Oro Group, sales of Passive Optical Network (PON) equipment for Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH) deployments, cable broadband access equipment, and fixed wireless customer-premises equipment (CPE) will all increase from 2021 to 2026, as service providers look to expand both the reach and rate of their fixed broadband services.

“Between national broadband plans, public subsidization, and private equity, spending on broadband infrastructure will see sustained growth through 2024, and will remain strong through 2026,” said Jeff Heynen, Vice President at Dell’Oro Group. “Competition for broadband subscribers is heating up everywhere, fueling the need for operators to invest heavily in their access networks.”

Driven largely by XGS-PON deployments in North America, EMEA, and CALA, PON equipment revenue is expected to grow from $8.3 billion in 2021 to $9.8 billion in 2026. Fixed wireless CPE and Cable Distributed Access Equipment will also see revenues rise during this period.

Roll up, roll up! FWA tipped for rapid growth in the US

The pandemic of the past two years has driven even greater demand for broadband services and prompted service providers and their investors to develop and build networks and service portfolios that can best service the needs of their potential customers. That situation, aided in part by the roll-out of 5G, has given the niche Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) market a new lease of life and, according to one industry research company, will fuel FWA service uptake in the coming few years.

In its latest North America Fixed Communications Forecast Pack, data analytics company GlobalData estimated that in the US alone, FWA will account for nearly 9% of all broadband access lines in 2026. Residential and business FWA subscriptions are forecast to hit 10.43 million by that year, up fivefold from the 1.95 million FWA connections expected across the US by the end of 2022.

The momentum is attributed to “a perfect storm” of factors, including increased user demand and government action to meet it, enhanced data performance with 5G, user friendliness from new technological approaches and a craving by operators to cash in on fixed broadband services.

Tuyệt vời! Vietnam to develop broadband telecoms to better serve users’ needs

According to statistics of the Department of Telecommunications under the Ministry of Information and Communications, by the end of 2021, Vietnam had 70.9 million mobile broadband subscribers, accounting for 57.23 percent of the total number of mobile subscribers, up 4 percent year-on-year; and 18.79 million fixed broadband subscribers, up 14.59 percent year-on-year.

The average revenue per unit (ARPU) of fixed broadband subscriptions in 10 months of 2021 was only about 137,000 VND (about 6 USD), down 8 percent compared to 2020 (149,000 VND). Among the nearly 18 million fiber-optic broadband subscribers in Vietnam, up to 83 percent use packages with speeds below 100Mbps, making Vietnam’s fiber-optic broadband speed still much lower than that of some countries in the region.

Hoang Duc Dung from the Viettel Network Corporation, an affiliate of the Viettel Group, said that Vietnam is among the markets with the cheapest internet charges in the world, ranking 12th out of the 211 countries and territories in terms of fixed broadband internet charges. In 2021, Internet capacity grew rapidly, but revenue only increased 2 percent per year.

FCC doles out $1.2 billion in RDOF program funds but wants greater accountability

The Federal Communications Commission is set to award another $1.2 billion through its Rural Digital Opportunities Fund (RDOF), after an overhaul that the agency says improves its ability to make sure that companies actually deliver the rural broadband service that they have said they will. The $1.2 billion RDOF wave will fund broadband deployments in 32 states to connect more than one million locations, and it is the largest RDOF funding amount to date.

In hopes of tightening up accountability for providers who won work through RDOF, the FCC has created a new Rural Broadband Accountability Plan, which it described as “a new effort to monitor and ensure compliance for universal service high-cost programs including the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund.” This includes, for the first time, making public some of the FCC’s verification data on the performance of the delivered networks, including speed and latency testing.

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement that the accountability plan “will speed up our audit and verification processes and for the first time make public the results of verifications, audits, and speed and latency testing. These new measures will help ensure that the providers we fund in this program will do the job.”

Wholesale model reshaping fiber rollout in Western Europe?

The expansion of fiber networks is progressing fast in Western Europe, where an average of seven million premises were connected each quarter over the last year, reports Dataxis. When considering the five biggest consumer markets in the region, it is clear that the deployment of fiber infrastructures widely varies in each country.

The market is currently being reshaped by an unprecedented investor rush in broadband infrastructures. Dozens of global and regional private equity funds have shown interest in deploying fiber connections in Europe, by acquiring local networks or investing capital in historical operators’ infrastructures to finance the expansion of their footprint. With governments and local authorities providing huge scale subsidies in national fiber rollout projects, the context is ideal for network builders to find investors.

In France for example, a total of €20 billion, out of which €3.3 billion from the government, are being invested into a national fiber rollout launched since 2013. In Q3 2021, over 28 million premises have been connected, with rollout prerogatives defined by zones and attributed to different network operators.