2015 Global Broadband - Countries Embrace National Broadband Networks

Fibre infrastructure making inroads

The majority of governments around the world have now accepted that national broadband networks are the way forward with over 140 countries around the world having concrete national broadband networks in place.

The challenge now is to put these policies into practice and implement these policies. Ultimately all of these broadband plans will require national fibre optic networks. There simply is no other technology that can handle the capacity of data and applications that will be needed to run the cities and countries from today onwards. This infrastructure needs to be robust. It has to have enormous capacity. It needs to be secure and to be able to protect privacy.

All agree that a broadband infrastructure is needed to face the economic and social challenges that lie ahead and broadband infrastructure is perceived by all to be critical for the development of the digital economy, healthcare, education, e-government and so on. The resource-rich countries have embarked on large-scale FttP projects in order to diversify their economies.

With more and more countries rolling out FttP networks, the knowledge base of the technology has increased, while at the same time the cost of deployment has decreased. Around the world, FttP has become the norm in Greenfield deployments.

A well-designed network will be able to support different applications in the future, including those not well supported by either today’s ‘telecom’ or ‘Internet’, or other applications not even conceived yet. The most important technological consideration should be that it is flexible.

It will take time to achieve the big social and economic benefits and the key reason for this are that the availability of fast broadband is sufficiently new and insufficiently ubiquitous that we cannot yet expect to see all of the productivity benefits.

Key developments:

• FttP rollouts are occurring in some developing economies such as Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil, and India, where there is demand in at least the top 5% of the market. In such economies this immediately translates into tens of millions of users.
• In terms of broadband penetration, the top 5 countries globally include: Switzerland; Norway; Denmark; The Netherlands and France.
• Resolving the issues surrounding control and governance of the Internet is of fundamental importance to the future success of the Internet.
• There is no doubt that the Google Fiber project been a success and it has announced over 30 more areas which it will move into with its fibre networks - putting more and more pressure on the US incumbents.
• Global broadband speeds continue to rise and at the end of 2014 the global average sat at 4.5 mb/s.
• Global broadband prices are declining in most parts of the world, making it more affordable and therefore more obtainable to the greater population. However in many of the developing countries the average decline rate in broadband pricing has begun to slow.
• With more and more video applications being used in ever increasing broader markets; there is a widespread interest and pressure to offer higher-speed services.
• Asia is a key broadband market and accounted for around 46% of global fixed broadband subscribers coming into 2015.