Summary Bullets:            

• AT&T’s announcement of Project AirGig in 2016 was a compelling and novel way to think about providing high-speed broadband services.
• Following a press conference and tease of a 2021 release in 2018, AT&T has gone silent on the project, prompting questions about its future.

Bygone BPL

During the mid-2000’s, broadband over power line (BPL) technology (using power lines to simultaneously transmit data signals) was an exciting topic in the telecommunications industry.  The hope was the technology could deliver speeds equivalent or greater than ADSL and provide a cheap and effective means of connecting rural communities and improving broadband infrastructure in brownfield areas without the need to lay new fiber.  The IEEE developed standards, and various governments, carriers, and even utilities launched trials and services.  While the technology caught on for some utilities as a means to monitor the health of their own grids, most if not all commercial attempts to develop a consumer access product failed.  Failures were blamed on a few factors, including radio interference easily impacting unshielded power lines, complications managing right-of-way access with utilities, and slower than predicted data rates.  Today, BPL for consumer access is all but dead; however, at the end of 2016, AT&T announced a new project, ‘AirGig,’ with a lot of similarities. Continue reading “Whatever Happened to AT&T’s AirGig?” →

Summary Bullets:

• Amidst all the fiber network hype and almost daily announcements of new infrastructure plans, Vodafone’s launch of Ethernet services over CityFibre networks means that UK enterprises can now start to benefit from them.

• Enterprises should be aware how fiber expansion can offer an enhanced work from home experience and how emerging technologies (e.g., hollow core fiber) may support advanced services.

Fiber network roll-out announcements have been coming thick and fast recently, but now UK enterprises can finally benefit from actual services, marking a key staging post.

Over recent weeks, there have been announcements on fiber deployment from CityFibre, BT/Openreach, Virgin Media O2, and numerous smaller altnets – including Upp’s announcement on June 1, 2021 that it will invest GBP 1 billion to deploy FTTH to a million premises by 2025.

So far, the focus has been on investment models, premises passed, and connection speeds – which has been of interest to analysts but less so to enterprises. Any actual services have tended to focus on the consumer segment, but now businesses of all sizes and resellers stand to benefit from these fiber builds.

Vodafone has announced that it is launching Ethernet services over its partner CityFibre’s network in Cambridge, Coventry, and Peterborough, with Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Huddersfield, Leeds, Leicester, Milton Keynes, Northampton, Portsmouth, and Southend-on-Sea to follow. The new service is positioned as offering a tailored private data network on a single or multiple premises, and as a complement to Vodafone’s full-fiber (FTTP) broadband.

Continue reading “Turning Fiber into Business Services” →

Summary Bullets:

• Singtel has announced a new strategy alongside its financial results, which includes a renewed focus on digital business and the expansion of its NCS unit internationally.

• While Singtel has identified the right trends to click into for NCS, the Australian and Chinese markets will be challenge and there could be other opportunities with its subsidiaries in ASEAN.

Singtel announced its financial results for the fiscal year 2021 ended March 31, 2021 on May 28, 2021. Singtel reported a difficult year across the group, in part due to the effects of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic as well as structural changes with the NBN in Australia and more generally across the telco sector. However the company did share some bright spots, for example the performance of its NCS business. Further, as part of the associated analyst and investor presentation Singtel presented a new strategy going forward with the hopes of capitalizing on key growth trends in digital and ICT markets in Asia-Pacific region. These include “B2B digital services growth,” “digital ASEAN opportunity,” and “rapid digitalisation fuelling infrastructure demand.

What’s the Plan?

Continue reading “SingTel’s NCS Strategy Hits the Right Notes, but Might be Looking in the Wrong Places” →