Skip to main content

FTTH... the race is on

Following on a theme around Fiber-to-the-Home projects here in Thailand Geoff Long provided an update on the unfolding story in the Bangkok Post. He classifies it in his closing as the race to be the first such project in the South East Asia.

It would certainly be an exciting time and a good thing for Thailand to be up on the bleeding edge rather than being way behind like in the Telecoms arena (for those who are current on the NTC here in Thailand).

The benefits of a fiber based TV solution, given the ongoing disruption of service caused by rain to the current digital satellite UBC solution, are very appealing.

To my mind there should also be a solution to the persistent problem around digital service today, that of parallel feeds.

The apathy in adoption of digital TV in the UK, over the persistence of the choice of analogue, comes from two stoppers. Firstly that of unfamiliar technology. The digital, freeview, service is still an infant and as a result people don't trust it.

Secondly, and possibly more importantly, is the limitation of the current digital topbox hardware. People in the UK are used to being able to watch a soap opera on one channel whilst recording a competing offering on another channel. This is not possible with the digital services available today, the topbox provides a single feed as the decoder can only handle the single channel.

Sky+ in the UK have solved the problem such that subscribers can watch one channel and record or Picture-in-Picture a second channel.

For these services to be successful they need to be able to provide a differentiator. I believe that parallel feeds as well as triple play would be a very appealing service for the average subscriber.

It would certainly pull me away from UBC, but then I'm not that "sticky" anyway.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In the overlap of technology, marketing and social media the QR Code is critical

Outside of consulting on telecommunications, CIO advisory, and the business adoption of technology I also completed an MBA.  One of the projects was on the potential use cases of two dimensional barcodes. Today the QR Code , one of many types of 2D codes, is seen as being a critical component of any good marketing plan.  As a natural integration between social media and devices I would extend VMob Bob's question " What can a mobile operator learn from Facebook ?" and also ask how can they step and start to make innovations with the extensions to social media that already exist today?
Post a Comment
Read more

Access as infrastructure, what does this mean for Telco 2.0?

Having recently attended a seminar by Catherine Middleton from Ryerson on Australia's NBN initiative it got me thinking about "access as infrastructure". The Australian Government is investing $B's of public and private capital in a national broadband network that is a fibre to the premise platform, although for distant and remote sites it will most likely be a fixed wireless solution.  The proposition from Dr. Middleton is that ubiquitous access will create a platform for services that separates competition from access, sounds like Telco 2.0. The question I posed was if the idea is a common platform but close to 10% of that access will be at 12Mbps rather than 100Mbps (fixed wireless versus fibre) then surely the lowest common denominator will prevail and services will be designed for 12Mbps.  You would then question the rationale of FTTP or FTTH when you could go fixed wireless.  Over time LTE and similar technologies will see an increase in speed that will of...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Phone or a Swiss Army Knife?

It's getting to that time when I should start looking for my new handset. I choose the word carefully as today you are very lucky to find just a phone. Most handsets today are either a phone and media player, a phone and a camera (sometimes video), a phone and a PDA the list of combinations goes on and on. Now this might be great in the marketing room "what can we do next?" but the point that is lost on many of the manufacturers is this; people want a phone first the rest is secondary. Many of the hybrid handsets look good, can have great MP3 playback but suffer in size, ease of use of the main function (phone calls) or have poor battery life because of all the other gadgets hanging off of it. It's very similar to the Swiss Army Knife, the knife is often too small to be used for much over opening your letters, the screwdriver is hard to use because the size of the body means you can't get to a lot of the screws on objects, the pliers have little leverage because t...
1 comment
Read more