2022.04.08 – Open Broadband News

Exciting! Digitalization set to boom telco sector

Communications service providers (CSPs) are desperate to grow their business with enterprise customers as demand for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), private 5G and other ‘digital transformation’ services grows. But to take full advantage of the growth opportunities CSPs will need what the team at Appledore Research refers to as “a new management layer that supports automation, agility, and therefore cost-effective innovation, often by third parties, and also often by exposing APIs and NaaS.”

That management layer is often referred to as “end-to-end” or “cross-domain” orchestration, notes the analyst firm, and requires new capabilities compared with existing orchestration tools, especially those that enable automated processes.

Those capabilities are now highly prized by operators: “CSPs have increasingly realised that automation is a business requirement, not a technical feature,” notes Appledore’s Grant Lenahan, one of the authors of the new report, Market Outlook: End-to-end Service Orchestration.

Better access to ultra-fast broadband for more Australians

More Australians will be able to access ultra-fast broadband following the announcement today by NBN Co that an additional 100,000 homes and businesses across New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland and Western Australia are eligible for an upgrade to their NBN connection.

This new tranche of areas selected by NBN Co in Fiber to the Node areas means a total of 1.7 million premises of around 2 million planned premises, are now eligible for upgrades to access on demand ultra-fast broadband speeds of up to one Gigabit per second (Gbps).

Minister for Communications, Urban Infrastructure, Cities and the Arts, the Hon Paul Fletcher MP, said the NBN continues to assist more families and communities with access to ultra-fast broadband services. “The Morrison Government is delivering on our $4.5 billion network upgrades that will mean up to 75 percent of premises in the fixed line network are able to access ultra-fast broadband by 2023,” Minister Fletcher said.

Analysts think copper is likely to linger in US despite fiber frenzy

While operators have talked up copper retirement plans at respective investor day events in recent months, analysts have told Fierce Telecom that the technology is likely to stick around in the U.S. at least until the end of the decade. That’s in part because copper is deeply entrenched in the country.

There is no question that operators are eager to move away from copper. In a recap of its recent Fiber-to-the-Future Conference, New Street Research’s Jonathan Chaplin noted “All the ILECs we spoke to seemed to agree that there are significant Opex and maintenance capex savings to be gleaned from either replacing copper with fiber or FWB [fixed wireless broadband].” But Chaplin added Verizon executives said the regulatory process around retirement “isn’t straightforward” and he concluded “mass copper retirement is not right around the corner.”

Part of the problem is the sheer scale of the transition. NSR’s Blair Levin pointed out in a separate note Verizon still has approximately 12 million locations served with copper. Meanwhile, the team at MoffettNathanson noted copper subscribers account for around 60 percent of AT&T’s consumer wireline business. AT&T’s copper footprint currently covers around 60 million locations and while the operator is looking to cut that figure to 30 million by 2025, that would still leave it with 30 million locations to go.

UK takes a tumble in worldwide broadband affordability rankings

A new study has tested fixed broadband ISP packages from 220 countries to create a global price comparison, which finds that the UK ranks just 92nd cheapest (down sharply from 67th last year) with an average monthly cost of $39.01 (£29.66).

The research, which used data from 3,356 fixed broadband deals gathered between 19th January 2022 and 30th March 2022, does however note that the United Kingdom came 10th cheapest (down from 4th) when compared against the 29 countries studied in Western Europe.

Otherwise, Burundi came out as the country with the most expensive average package cost ($429.94), while Syria delivered the cheapest ($2.15), albeit partly due to its depreciated currency. By comparison, the average package cost across the world as a whole came out as $57.07 (down from $78.14), so at least the United Kingdom is comfortably below that.

Israel enables unified fixed broadband services

Israel’s Ministry of Communications (MoC) has overhauled fixed broadband laws separating infrastructure and internet service provision.

First announced in June 2021, the reforms will allow residential consumers to receive unified services (infrastructure and ISP service) from a single provider. The MoC claims that this stop customers paying for ‘dormant’ subscriptions that they no longer use – an issue that costs Israeli consumers an estimated ILS50 million (US$16 million) annually.

The MoC claimed in a statement that it had introduced new protections ahead of the broadband overhaul to ensure that smaller fixed broadband companies could provide services “effectively, equitably and competitively vis-a-vis the infrastructure owners within the wholesale market.” Infrastructure owners must now sign binding agreements with companies that intend to use their networks, with compensation measures in place in the event that these agreements are breached.