Telecoms Tech

The tech press has been abuzz last week when it was first leaked and later announced that Deutsche Telekom would soon apply data caps to their wireline broadband offers (see this Fierce Telecom article for details.) Unlike AT&T style caps, heavy users will not be charged overage, they will be throttled to service levels marginally higher than what we’d get in the days of dial-up.

Ask a telecom service provider’s CTO, “Would you prefer to operate network infrastructure based on fiber optics or a copper-based network?” These CTOs snap back in a second, “Fiber!” Now ask a CIO or IT manager, “Would you prefer a local area network (LAN) based on fiber optics or copper?” and you may hear 100 questions.

Network users need more and more bandwidth. At the same time, your CFO wants to reduce IT spending. How can you address both needs with your local area network (LAN)?

With carrier capex under pressure, what pockets of growth exist in the optical industry? What type of vendor can best go after these opportunities? Speakers at OFC/NFOEC’s State of the Industry panel disagreed on the answers, but all seemed to accept that these were the right questions to ask.

Over the past several weeks, I have been analysing future bandwidth needs for residential subscribers, and my conclusions are fuzzy at best.

Vodafone and Orange have announced plans to jointly build a nationwide FTTH network in Spain in an effort to strengthen their positions in the converged services space and compete with Telefonica in the Spanish FTTH market. The plan involves the two partners using the same technical specifications to independently deploy street-level fiber in complementary areas.

Demand for wearable computing devices are forecast to grow rapidly over the next year. With a wave of new gadgets set to reach the consumer electronics market, it's very possible that this technology could become commonplace within five years. According to the latest market study by ABI Research, they now forecast that the wearable computing device market will grow to 485 million annual device shipments by 2018.

The global wired broadband market - including DSL, cable, and fiber-optic services - generated $188 billion service revenue in 2012; that's a 7 percent increase from 2011. According to the latest market study by ABI Research, fixed broadband service revenue will grow to $251 billion by 2018.