Vodafone plans to invest about €2 billion over the next four years to provide around 13.7 million new gigabit broadband connections to homes and businesses in Germany, its biggest European market.
Under the Gigabit Investment Plan, Vodafone Germany will target 100,000 companies in around 2,000 business parks, one million homes in rural areas, and 12.6 million cable customers.
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.
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.
As the pandemic underlines the value of the internet more than ever, its underlying technology is making one of its biggest transitions for years.
The data centre market is a particularly wide-ranging one, with one of the driving forces in recent years the emergence of the hyperscale data centre or cloud service provider.
As the world struggles to settle into the ‘new normal’, today’s optical networks need to be flexible in their architecture blueprint, while adapting to new technologies to provide the kinds of new capacity and service options to meet accelerated demand for higher bandwidth.
To address the undeniable growing demand for higher bandwidth, optical vendors have been playing their role with the development of various coherent optical transceivers for different areas of the market, each with its own set of design considerations.
The demand for bandwidth has unarguably skyrocketed in recent years, thanks largely to the increased appetite for online gaming, content streaming and social-media use.
The importance of reliable connectivity has never been more recognised than it is now. While ambitious targets have been in place across the world for fibre deployment for some time, the ongoing pandemic has served to push it to the forefront.
Looking into the future of telecommunications, it could be argued that AI and telcos will effectively transform each other, explains Raf Meersman
How do we, as an industry, build better broadband for a post-pandemic world? The answer could be fixed, suggests Stefaan Vanhastel
Altnets could be the key to connecting rural areas in 2021, argues Michael Armitage
A glance at the current market for fifth-generation coherent optics, and some of the latest developments available
