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11/3/13
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COVER STORY
economic destiny of our countries and region,” she declared. MESSAGES. Her challenge was taken up emphatically by Swedish MEP Gunnar Hökmark who presented his views on why Europe needs a real push for the deployment of ultrafast broadband. “I have three messages to deliver here today,” he stated. “First of all, new services, innovations and information flows must grow, flourish and create economic growth without being dependent on technological speeds and capacities of the past. Secondly, Europe needs to raise its game and ambitions if we are going to reap the benefits of the new digital revolution. Thirdly, Europe must talk less about megabytes and more about gigabytes.” “It took us 30 years from Thomas Alva Edison's invention of the electric bulb until we started to turn the lights downwards. The mindset of the candle light still kept us captured in the same way as cars and trains for a long time looked like horse carriages. Most new products or inventions use the design and logic of the past simply because our perceptions about the future are based on our experiences from the past,” he observed. “Our minds and understanding about the future have been shaped by the last 30 years. That’s why we underestimate the pace and magnitude of change and overvalue the structures of the past. We still talk about emerging economies although they already have emerged. In Sweden we still talk about the Swedish car industry although it is mainly Chinese. We still talk about the US as the number one economy although European Union thanks to enlargements and the internal market is de facto the world's biggest economy. We still take it for granted that we are leading prosperity and welfare levels although the current crisis suggests that we are leading the global crisis,” he suggested. PHONOMENA. “The emergence of telecoms follows the same pattern regarding the 30 years delay. We still talk about distributing and coordinating frequencies every fourth year in the framework of the International Telecommunication Union, although the market is changing so much faster. Our logic and understanding about the future in telecoms sometimes still seems to be based in a time when an International call was more exciting than Christmas,” he noted.
Fibre drives global broadband access forward
As broadband subscribers approach 635 million globally, the latest figures published by the Broadband Forum and prepared by broadband industry analysts Point Topic reveal that hybrid fibre access (FTTx) has experienced the highest market gain over the past year. Of the 54m new broadband subscribers added in the year leading up to 3Q 2012, 26m are being served with fibre (48%). Overall, fibre deployments have now passed cable to account for 19.7% of the total broadband market. Despite facing harsh economic times, the overall broadband growth during the third quarter 2012 is estimated at over 12m lines. Oliver Johnson, CEO at Point Topic
said: “As the world gradually emerges from financial turmoil, the continued growth of broadband has been a steady light in the storm. We won’t see the triple digit growth of old but many markets are entering a phase of consolidation and consumer multi-service alignment.” The Broadband Forum continues to expand its fibrerelated solutions, building on its comprehensive BroadbandSuite 5.0 release, which is a major resource for the fibre industry to facilitate and accelerate the deployment of PON. The Broadband Forum G-PON ONU (Optical Network Unit) Certification Programme – a world first initiative – is also expanding. The certification programme, known as BBF.247, is open to G-PON ONU products with Ethernet interfaces. This certification demon-
strates that an ONU conforms to TR-156 and the associated OMCI configuration as defined in the ITU-T G.988, and provides vendors with the opportunity to test once and use their certification globally, saving testing cost and time as they compete in RFPs for business. Equally, it gives operators increased confidence in their vendor selection processes, another step towards providing truly interoperable solutions. “Our G-PON Certification program will help the industry expedite fibre network roll-out and pave the way for swift expansion of superfast broadband and the development of new technologies. It will enable next generation systems to come to the market faster and with interoperability from day one,” commented Robin Mersh, CEO of the Broadband Forum.
The latest Broadband Forum work includes technical specifications related to Optical Access Nodes and associated test plans for conformance and inter-vendors interoperability. The ONU conformance testing programme is being expanded to address specific ONU profiles. Test plans are also developing around a proposed Broadband Forum G-PON ONU/OLT test suite, which establishes OLT network interoperability with BBF.247 certified ONUs. Furthermore, the G-PON test plans are being extended to XG-PON1, covering both Physical Layer and upper l ayers for ITU-T PON technology. Optical layer management for PON access and Layer 2 PON architecture and functional requirements are also in development, and projects on Intelligent Optical Distribution Networks (ODN) and Fibre to the Distribution Point (FTTdp) have just started. The FTTdp work is particularly exciting since it has the potential to speed up and simplify the installation of super-fast broadband. The Broadband Forum is working with the ITU-T to enable this new architecture, while ETSI is supporting the development by addressing the reverse powering aspects.
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