Coming soon to your city: Fiber-to-the Home!

Did you ever wonder when India will get onto the FTTH map? Twelve months back, I would have said, “Join the club!” Six months back, I was rubbing my hands in anticipation. And today, I say, “Are you ready for the blazing speeds of Fiber”.

BSNL finally launched Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) services in Jaipur last month. With 68 buildings connected initially, work is now on to connect 200 buildings. This comes after the news in July last year that BSNL was planning to implement similar FTTH networks in 25 Indian cities by 2012 impacting over 2 million subscribers.

But while this is still too little, what’s important is that it isn’t too late!

A report by RVA released recently, commissioned by the FTTH Council in the US says that 5.8 million North American homes are now connected with fiber. Assuming 110 million households in the US, this is a penetration of roughly 5% only. Similarly, a report by iDate shows that there were 2.5 million subscribers for FTTH/B in the European Union at the end of 2009. Assuming more than 180 million households, this presents an even lower penetration rate of ~ 1.5%. China and Russia have been fast-tracking their FTTH deployments and have penetrations of nearly 3%, most of which have been within the last couple of years.

That doesn’t sound like we have too much catching up to do.

If the Indian government decides to up the ante and major telcos like BSNL, Bharti and Reliance go full-throttle, we might become the fastest growing FTTH market and among the largest – mirroring the fantastic story that we have witnessed in the Indian wireless sector.

Implications: India has been deploying over 8 million kms of optical fiber for the last couple of years. This has been focused more towards strengthening of the telecom backbone for catering to the increased cellular subscribers. A move to quicken the pace of FTTH rollout will require fiber laying in the ‘access’ network and the ‘last-mile’, not to say further strengthening of the backbone infrastructure. It seems that we should be readying ourselves for a decade of tens of millions km annual fiber consumption.

A high-fiber diet? That’s my kind of diet … … …