Welcome to the FTTH Council Europe

The French regulator, ARCEP, hopes to have found a way to ensure continued infrastructure competition, having announced its ruling on the vertical portion of in-building cabling this week.

European IPTV operators will double their share of the region's pay-TV market by 2014, according to a new report published by Pyramid Research.

 Belgium surfed closer to FTTH when the Minister for Business, Vincent Van Quickenborne unveiled the ‘SuperFastBelgium’ plan, which is designed to stimulate the deployment of optical fibre across the country.

Susan Crawford, special assistant to president Obama for science, technology and innovation policy, has touted the idea of public investment in a nationwide, state-of-the-art broadband network featuring speeds 100 times faster than those available today.

Outgoing UK government minister Lord Carter has published his ‘Digital Britain’ report; a review of policy recommendations aimed at encouraging – amongst other things – greater penetration of broadband services to all British citizens.

Analyst firm Strategy Analytics has published a new forecast for broadband growth in Western Europe, claiming there will be 150m broadband subscribers in the region by 2013 (80% of all households).  A total of 9% of these will be via fibre connection.

The BBC has conducted a week-long focus upon the issue of broadband in the UK.  The UK’s public service broadcaster has uncovered around 3 million homes which have broadband speeds of less than 2Mbps; a regrettable state-of-affairs given the UK government has promised to provide all UK homes with speeds of at least 2Mbps by 2012.

The European Commission has written to Dutch telecoms regulator OPTA regarding its plans to intervene over incumbent operator KPN’s pricing models for ‘FTTO’ (‘Fibre to the Office’) networks.