Broadband Access

The Market Need

The Broadband Access market is changing dramatically as vendors introduce new technologies to enable next-generation services. The current technology scenery is quite manifold.

Fiber deployments continue to expand around the world, China and US. Asia continues to be the dominant player globally in the FTTX broadband market, with, for example, China Mobile running the world’s biggest optical transport network, with backbone capacity of around 300 Tbit/s, and 98% of its household customers connected via fiber. The 10 Gbps FTTH deployments continue to build momentum.

In terms of transmission technology, different PON flavors coexist. In 2020 operators will start deploying multi-technology optical line terminals (OLTs), converging GPON, XGS-PON and potentially 25G and 50G PON. While NG-PON2 technology allows to converge the services networks onto a single ODN, providing a significant TCO reduction, its adoption is delayed all the time due to lack of cheap tunable transceivers. XGS-PON is much simpler and most of telecom operators are currently focused on XGS-PON deployments.

While telecom operators increase their investments in FTTX, especially in greenfield locations, user connectivity in brownfield locations is a challenge, particularly in the last few hundred meters to and within the customer premises, over existing copper lines. Running fiber cables there can be heavily regulated, and in some cases impossible. In addition, the installation can be complicated and time consuming.  Therefore, some operators are using G.Fast as a complement to the fiber, and others ever more consider 5G Fixed Wireless Access as an alternative to fixed-line copper and fibre services.  Analysys Mason Analysts suggest that per-subscriber self-provision costs of 5G FWA and typical wholesale FTTx access costs are balanced, and the market opportunity for 5G FWA is about 20–30% of broadband connections in developed economies and higher in emerging ones.