Europe’s Flagging Fibre

21 years ago it was already becoming obvious that Europe’s telcos were falling behind Asian telcos in the rate at which they were installing fibre to the home.

When asked at the Fibrecomm2003 conference whether there was any operator in Europe with significant plans to bring fibre nearer to the user, Jean Baptiste-Loire, vice-president of marketing for Infineon Technology’s wireline communications group, replied: “If there are any of them, we don’t know about them.”

Nonetheless, Infineon sees access technologies as the key market in wireline communications. “We need to access the market with more power and more bandwidth,” said Baptiste-Loire, adding, “in Korea and Japan they’re trying to get fibre-optics as close as possible to the user.”

As well as the obvious applications like video, Asian operators are seeing VoIP – voice calls over the Internet – as a route to reducing both power and the costs of operating the network. “Operators want cheap ways to add services,” said Baptiste-Loire, “and to reduce the costs of telephony.”

At the moment, however, network operators were only talking about putting in VoIP systems rather than installing them, according to Baptiste-Loire.