Has any country embraced FTTH internet?

No, and I can ensure you that the situation in my country is very bad about the effective broadband beyond what is advertised.
Part of the problem is due to the territorial morphology and on the other hand don't give importance at the the virtual highways.

John Photography wrote:
FTTH (fiber to the home) That's optical fiber...

We almost had this in Australia. The opposition party and it's big business friends however ran a huge campaign of negativity and disinformation that ruined the idea.

And now we elected a government of short sighted conservatives who still believe in copper wire.

This isn't meant to be political but what countries have tried to embrace FTTH for high speed internet infrastructure?

Over here companies like Foxtel really pushed and lobbied to kill the idea. In the USA it was Comcast that also pushed hard against this?

Are these people idiots? It would not have hurt their business model one iota. In fact they could have made more money out of content distribution had they embraced it..


Thoughts anyone?

Countries where there's a single government controlled telecommunications carrier are at least looking at it. Countries like the US, where there is a hodgepodge of phone, cable TV, satellite, etc. not so much.

Here in the US, the question is complicated by the fact that internet access isn't regulated as a telecommunications service, and almost nobody on the business side of the question wants it to be (because then they'd have to, y'know, live up to promises made, meet SLAs, and stuff...)

alessandro2009 wrote:

No, and I can ensure you that the situation in my country is very bad about the effective broadband beyond what is advertised.
Part of the problem is due to the territorial morphology and on the other hand don't give importance at the the virtual highways.

I have a friend visiting from Naples right now, that only yesterday was saying how slow her internet connection is there.

Ken Warren Photography wrote:

Countries where there's a single government controlled telecommunications carrier are at least looking at it. Countries like the US, where there is a hodgepodge of phone, cable TV, satellite, etc. not so much.

Here in the US, the question is complicated by the fact that internet access isn't regulated as a telecommunications service, and almost nobody on the business side of the question wants it to be (because then they'd have to, y'know, live up to promises made, meet SLAs, and stuff...)

Plus you guys have as I mentioned companies like Comcast, who like Foxtel over here threw a tantrum when the previous govt. wanted to do FTTH... They felt scared it would kill their market share instead of adapting and embracing it.

John Photography wrote:

Plus you guys have as I mentioned companies like Comcast, who like Foxtel over here threw a tantrum when the previous govt. wanted to do FTTH... They felt scared it would kill their market share instead of adapting and embracing it.

It's far from the same problem. All of the wired carriers are de facto local monopolies for the regulated service they provide: Cable companies provide basic (analog) cable, phone companies provide copper landlines. As a result, they're treated as common carriers for those services. Being a common carrier has an associated regulatory burden ("onerous" according to cable and phone companies) so they're doing everything they can to move away from providing those services. Comcast and other cable providers are doing it by going to digital cable, Verizon et al. by moving to fiber/VOIP services.

All of the providers have a significant investment (multiple billions of dollars) in their infrastructures, which is what makes them de facto monopolies: the cost of putting your own infrastructure in is prohibitive for the most part.

Ken Warren Photography wrote:
It's far from the same problem. All of the wired carriers are de facto local monopolies for the regulated service they provide: Cable companies provide basic (analog) cable, phone companies provide copper landlines. As a result, they're treated as common carriers for those services. Being a common carrier has an associated regulatory burden ("onerous" according to cable and phone companies) so they're doing everything they can to move away from providing those services. Comcast and other cable providers are doing it by going to digital cable, Verizon et al. by moving to fiber/VOIP services.

All of the providers have a significant investment (multiple billions of dollars) in their infrastructures, which is what makes them de facto monopolies: the cost of putting your own infrastructure in is prohibitive for the most part.

That said, almost all of the larger cable companies have gone to an architecture in which fiber is used from the head end to a local node in the neighborhood. Coax cable is used from that node to the homes.  Because there aren't a large number of homes on each coax run, there is more than enough bandwidth for each home. 

Verizon has been installing FTTH in more dense population centers, but that effort has recently slowed.

Tom Wheeler, the current chairman of our FCC, has been talking about making IP provisioning in the US a common carrier function.  Obama came out the other day saying he wanted that to happen.  My guess is that it won't happen.

- Phil H - wrote:
Here, fiber to the nearest kerbside junction box is being rolled out pretty extensively, with a short run of copper from kerbside to home.

I suspect it will only be a matter of time before it's fiber right to the door, but as is, to the kerbside alone makes a massive difference in download speeds.

Virgin [UK] is committed to it, Phil, and they provide fibre to manhole [personhole? LOL]/street box now. And, yes, OFCOM has forced BT to permit competitor's access as fibre-to-cabinet [ASDL thereafter to address over BT copper lines], and then OFCOM followed up with mandating access to BT ducts and overhead poles opening the way to fiber to address services.

My fibre ends ~ 20 feet from my address. The Last time I had a Virgin guy in the house, about 6 montha ago, he installed a new router with up to 500Mb service capability and told me that it [fiber to address] is coming.

The other thing about the Internet landscape in the UK has been a choice of slower speed basic services for low cost v. very high / higher speed for more money; but, that said, Virgin has consistently upgraded service speeds over the last few years for the same money. So have their competitors. I started with Virgin's 2MB service ca 8 or so years ago, and that increased by way of upgrading to 10 and now 20MB, soon to be 50Mb - all done for the some price.

The UK has, as a country, committed to providing SOME level of Internet connectivity, by some means [wire, fibre, or wireless] to even the smallest farm house in the most remote valley in every part of the country. It will take years but the commitment is solid and the plans are moving along.

Studio36

John Photography wrote:
Here is a list of countries that do have FTTP or FTTH depending on your definitions.

I'm surprised Kenya has it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_to_t … by_country

That can only make you feel worse than you already do about the state of affairs in Oz.

Studio36

studio36uk wrote:

That can only make you feel worse than you already do about the state of affairs in Oz.

Studio36

It does...... We have so many short sighted leaders that can't see beyond the next election cycle. Career politicians.

Howcome pollies wages always rise but ordinary workers and peasants don't?