One year lost?

After a day to catch up with the open issues that you can not deal with when you are in an exhibition (I tend to receive a few e-mails per day) now it is time to think about what hapenned on Wednesday and Thursday in Lisbon and try to get a conclusion about the conference and the developments of FTTH in Europe.

When I left the conference last year in Copenhagen, I was really excited about the evolution of FTTH in 2009 and I was anxiously waiting for the meeting in Lisbon to see huge developments in the topic. However, in Lisbon I did not find a huge progress… Actually, I found almost no progress and thus I would say that the general conclusion of the conference is that 2009 was a lost year.

I can not blame the organizers for that, as they find topics and projects that happen during the year and try to develop them during the conference, but the sensation of continuity and no novelties was for me the most disappointing part of the conference.

We were lucky to have the conference in Lisbon, because Portugal is one of the most active countries in FTTH and thus, several operators were there advertising their FTTH connections reaching 1Gbps. Unfortunately, Portugal is just one of the oasis that we have in Europe but in general nothing changed that much…

In terms of FTTH users and penetration, the list is almost invariant, with Asian countries leading and some new players entering into the arena. Unfortunatelly, none of the big European economies were in the top-15 list in a relevant position… Italy is there, and France enters but are not in a good ranking… Another conclusion is that Europe is keeping behind FTTH…

If I could highlight one of the hot topics that was mostly discussed, this was social media. This is good and I believe that FTTH can be a very good enabler of social sites, as with more symmetrical connections, the end user can become part of the network more easily. However, this can not be the central topic of a conference of this kind…

In terms of technologies, almost no novelties. 10G-EPON was standardized a few months ago but I just found one manufacturer advertising it. The rest of them, kept pushing for GPON or P2P Ethernet… I find this strange, because 10G-EPON is a very powerful counter-attack to those who say that PON approaches are limited and they can not offer enough bandwidth… BTW, when I go to a stand that offer P2P solutions and say that they can offer 1G per user, I always ask the same question… What about core aggregation? Many times they feel a little bit embarrassed when they reply…

Talking about FTTH deployments, it was nice to hear that several Eastern European countries were actively developing FTTH. However, I found that in general the situation is of very slow evolution. I know that the economic situation is not helping, but if we all know that FTTH is the future, why it is not happening? I have some theories that I will be posting during the week.

Anyway, I will be in Milan next year. I am sure of that, because at least, I find a place to meet friends and discuss about FTTH. I hope next year we will have more topics and projects to talk about…