Irate broadband infrastructure firms have lashed out at a bizarre ruling from the UK’s advertising watchdog that will allow service providers to continue to use the word ‘fibre’ in their commercials, even when the connection to the home is not an optical fibre.
“Frankly, using this ruling I can now start calling my mobile phone a fibre phone because the delivery to my phone is over part fibre! It’s patently idiotic,” fumed Matthew Hare, chief executive of rural broadband provider Gigaclear.
Irate broadband infrastructure firms have lashed out at a bizarre ruling from the UK’s advertising watchdog that will allow service providers to continue to use the word ‘fibre’ in their commercials, even when the connection to the home is not an optical fibre.
“Frankly, using this ruling I can now start calling my mobile phone a fibre phone because the delivery to my phone is over part fibre! It’s patently idiotic,” fumed Matthew Hare, chief executive of rural broadband provider Gigaclear.
Helen Xenos explains how telcos can unlock the full potential of their existing fibre connections, allowing them to offer bursts of additional capacity without having to physically build out the network
Niek Jan van Damme, the head of Deutsche Telekom in Germany, chose the opening of the consumer electronics trade show, IFA 2017, this week to highlight the operator’s investments in fibre-optic broadband – while simultaneously downplaying the importance of FTTH in its overall strategy.
Local authorities in six different regions of the UK will set up pilot schemes designed to stimulate commercial roll-out of gigabit broadband networks, it was announced on Sunday.
The pilots are the first stage of a four-year, £200 million government programme to develop ‘local full fibre networks’, as outlined in the Spring Budget. The six projects will get around £10 million between them to test innovative approaches to connecting offices and public sector buildings with fibre infrastructure.
Britain has a reputation as a backwater when it comes to fibre-optic broadband connections that reach directly into consumer’s homes. Currently, only two per cent of households in the country have access to full fibre connections. But that looks set to change. This summer, some £500 million of equity and new debt have been invested in alternative network providers in the UK.
The influence of cloud and hyperscale data centre providers like Facebook, Google and Microsoft on the optical components industry is going to deepen, according to speakers at OFC 2017.
Openreach, owner of the UK’s access network infrastructure, will become a separate company with its own staff, management and strategy after BT Group reached an agreement with the regulator Ofcom, announced last Friday.
Calling it “the biggest reform of Openreach in its history”, Ofcom said BT has agreed to all the changes necessary to address its competition concerns, avoiding the need for more regulation.
Pauline Rigby untangles the common misunderstanding we see when comparing the economic benefits of 5G and fibre broadband
The legend of 5G grows mightier by the day. But before we can reach the promised land, core networks will require upgrades to shoulder the burden of the market’s ever-increasing demands for bandwidth, writes Paul Brooks of Viavi Solutions.
This week, the UK government handed broadband operators a double helping of encouragement to deploy fibre networks all the way to homes and businesses.
In the Autumn Statement outlining its future spending plans, the government allocated £400 million over four years to invest in deployment of full fibre networks, while also offering a five-year moratorium on the business rates charged on fibre networks.
It’s optical networking hardware Jim, but not as we know it: Facebook has unveiled Voyager, which it describes as the industry’s first white-box transponder and IP/MPLS routing solution.
The announcement was made at the first ever summit of the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) in Facebook’s headquarters at Menlo Park, California, this week.
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In the Spring edition of Fibre Systems, we looked at how to recruit and retain great telecoms talent, but what about once the recruitment process is complete?
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Keely Portway reviews some of the ways optical sensing has been used in communications for complementary applications
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A look at the market for optical fibre cables and some of the products and solutions available
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Abigail Williams provides a market update on fibre network deployments in the Asia Pacific region
Keely Portway discovers how the decision-making process for network architects, designers– and anyone involved in the design and deployment of FTTH networks – could be greatly simplified when it comes to choosing PON technology
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Gemma Church evaluates why spectral efficiency is an important but often overlooked performance criterion
Image credit: FTTH Council Europe/Messe Wien Exhibition & Congress Center, Vienna
Keely Portway highlights some of the key developments from the first physical FTTH Conference in two years
Keely Portway reports on the popular Market Watch panel that took place at OFC 2022, focusing on the current state of the optical market
