2022.05.27 – Open Broadband News

Not all bandwidth is created equal: What is QoE and why does it matter?

The more users access their broadband networks – and over the last couple of years, that increase has been unprecedented and rapid – the more acutely aware they become of the network experience they’re receiving.

For service providers, this offers both challenges and opportunity. It’s important that they are as accurate as possible measuring the experience that their customers are receiving. That means that increasingly outdated measurements of service quality – like speed or bandwidth alone – must be replaced by parameters that better gauge the actual experience of their subscribers.

Key to understanding this is defining the difference between Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE), and how the applicability and relevancy of these measurements have changed as the broadband market has evolved. Read the full blog from Craig Thomas, Vice President Strategic Marketing and Business Development at Broadband Forum here.

Europe ‘on track’ to meet connectivity targets; rural areas gaining focus

The FTTH Council Europe has revealed its latest market reports at the FTTH Conference in Vienna.

The reports outline the latest figures on fiber deployment trends in Europe: the 2022 Market Panorama; the FTTH Forecasts for 2022-2027; the FTTH/B Global Ranking and the report on FTTH/B in Rural Areas, prepared by Idate.

Reports are based on the latest available data from September 2021 and amongst their findings, the council says that they confirm the continuous progress of fiber roll-out, with full-fiber connectivity being a clear priority for EU authorities, national governments, and market players across Europe.

Eric Festraets, President of the FTTH Council Europe said: “The data from the latest Market Panorama confirms that fiber roll-out is steadily advancing at an increasingly faster pace. We can say with confidence that we are on the right track to meet the EU’s ambitious connectivity targets set out by ‘Gigabit Society 2025’ and ‘Digital Compass 2030’ strategies, yet the current momentum needs to be maintained and for this to happen the support at the political and regulatory level will be key.”

Global fixed broadband connections grow, with East Asia retaining the largest market share

Point Topic’s latest quarterly report on the state of global fixed broadband has shown that at the end of Q4 2021, the number of global fixed broadband connections grew by 1.5% and stood at 1.27 billion.

Overall, in Q4 2021, fixed broadband subscriber figures grew in 89% of the 130 countries covered in the report. The share of fiber-to-the-home/buildings (FTTH/B) in total fixed broadband subscriptions continued to increase and stood at 62.5%. Superfast and ultrafast cable broadband connections followed, with an 18% share.

East Asia has retained the largest regional market share of fixed broadband connections at 48%. Compared with Q3 2021, North America, Eastern Europe, Europe Other and Oceania saw their market shares decline, while they increased for Africa, America Other, East Asia and Asia Other, though in all regions the changes were by less than one percentage point.

What do the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act broadband funding rules mean for Rural Digital Opportunity Fund?

A lot of questions sprang up when the U.S. Government passed legislation last year which included $65 billion for broadband. Many of these related to just how exactly the Department of Commerce planned to administer the funds. But for many operators, there was one other key question: what about RDOF?

Back in 2020, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) held its Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) Phase I auction, doling out more than $9 billion to support broadband deployments in unserved areas. Notably, the FCC allowed satellite and fixed wireless access (FWA) operators to participate in the auction. After all, the goal was to reach the unreachable by any means necessary. When all was said and done, five of the top 10 RDOF winners were satellite or FWA providers.

New Street Research analyst Blair Levin said: “When the RDOF auction was held, there was no way the FCC could have known that Congress would invest heavily in achieving universal broadband coverage a few years later. But once Congress passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), it was clear there would be tension between the two efforts.”

Broadband Forum launches app-enabled services gateway project to revolutionize service providers’ business plans

The demand for better network services and faster innovations has presented operators with a distinct opportunity to look towards end-user network gateways such as Wi-Fi routers as a platform to unlock a myriad of third-party applications and services.

The app-enabled services gateway project from Broadband Forum helps service providers effectively deploy, activate and manage third party applications such as parental controls, Wi-Fi analytics, streaming services and security solutions to consumers on a centralized Internet gateway device or other Customer Premises Equipment (CPE). Service providers can also differentiate and scale their business models to provide a more customizable offering to each subscriber.

“As networks and consumers move into a post-sufficiency bandwidth world there is an emerging opportunity to leverage the potential of the CPE as a platform for serving the needs of end-users and suppliers,” said Oliver Johnson, CEO at Point Topic. “The exploitable functionality, properly managed and integrated, of an additional app like service layer right at the edge of the network will allow more control and better resilience for all the players in the ecosystem and improve choice and the overall experience for customers, the ultimate arbiters of any change.”