By Telecom Lead Team: Europe holds the strongest
position for IPTV with 23.5 million customers as European markets continue to
build their customer base.
The latest deployment information shows that operators
are increasingly turning to fiber access solutions to meet the needs of the
well-connected home, according to Broadband Forum.
Hybrid FTTx deployments increased by 68.9 percent in
2011. FTTH sees a 30.6 percent increase in annual growth across Europe.
Globally, IPTV approaches 55 million subscribers.
“The future of Europe, at least for the next 5
years, is going to be dominated by FTTx. The cost of full fiber (FTTH)
deployment, particularly the last mile, is prohibitive and so the industry and
consumers need a stepping stone which is provided by hybrid solutions such as
FTTx. FTTx provides a significant increase in bandwidth and an efficient
use of existing infrastructure and allows the welcome continued amortization of
costs,” said Oliver Johnson, CEO at Point Topic.
Broadband Forum added that its G-PON ONU Certification
Program is set to fuel even greater growth of fiber deployments across
Europe.
It provides vendors with the opportunity to test once and
use their certification globally, saving testing cost and time as they compete
in RFPs for business.
“Our G-PON certification program is proving to be
very effective with eight companies already achieving certified products in the
past six months. Certification is key to future FTTx deployments and our
efforts will enable next generation interoperable systems to come to market
faster,” said Robin Mersh, CEO of the Broadband Forum.
The latest fiber related work at the Forum includes test
specifications for additional conformance testing modules for G-PON ONU, OLT
and XG-PON1 as well as an interoperability test plan.
The forum added that work to enhance PON device
management via CPE WAN Management Protocol (TR-069) is in place, and new PON
energy efficiency efforts are under way.
Recently, The
Broadband Forum launched BroadbandSuite 6.0 that addresses network migration
requirements with practical resources, specifications, test plans, and best
practice documentation.
