Spain to Approach 50% FTTH by 2023

Spain's telecom regulator, Comisión del Mercado de las Telecomunicaciones (CMT), has published a study that states that 43 to 46 percent of Spain's households would have access to FTTH services by 2023. Competitive telcos would be able to use Telefonica's fiber ducts and trenches.

CMT also estimates that Spain will have about 3 million IPTV subscribers by 2023, with Telefónica atb70 percent of that market, or 2.1 million subscribers. At those levels, IPTV would represent about 36 percent of Spain's digital pay TV market.

This is an aggressive prediction but one that points to where major telcos globally need to be at that time. There does not seem to be any plan for financing this project, which would probably cost about $10 billion.

LTE Issues

Light Reading published an article based on discussions from the LTE World Summit. Carriers there identified a number of issues that need to be resolved before they deploy LTE, including:

• Support for voice and SMS services including circuit switching as well as packet switching.
• Building enough back haul capacity into the network to realize LTE's performance promises.
• Intellectual property rights.
• Spectrum

Much of this discussion revolved around lessons learned from 3G. It does point out the real problems carriers will have rationalizing both their 3G and 4G strategies. I think that they will either stay with 3G or replace their 3G networks with 4G networks. I think that trying to provide both will be a real mess.

Green Telecom

Light Reading has published a long article discussing the issues around green telecom. It describes why this is an important issue and different ways to approach it. Another interesting approach to this is contained in The Climate Group's Smart 2o20 report that takes a quantitative approach to this subject.

This is an important subject that is being addressed by the entire ICT industry including service providers and manufacturers. It will be important to push this agenda future.

Wireleine Woes

The New York Times published and article discussing if the U.S. wireline telcos will need a bailout to rescue its copper based access business. It pointed out that AT&T lost 12 percent of its access lines in 2008 and Verizon lost 10 percent. The article paints a pictures that the wireline business in the U.S. is headed toward bankruptcy.

I have been tracking U.S. switched access lines at my website from 1991 through 2007. The FCC has stopped tracking switched access lines, so that one of its most interesting pieces of data will no longer be updated.

It is clear that copper is being replaced by the cable companies coax, by wireless technologies, and by the telco's own fiber services. The more aggressively that they deploy fiber, the better off they will be in the long run.