France’s fibre operators fall in line with regulator
IP infrastructure in France has taken a number of crucial steps in recent years, none more so than the new alignment between the wishes of the regulator and the commercial ambitions of the fibre operators.
During the last year the French government and telecom regulator have gone far to promote fibre: a fibre framework developed in late 2007 applied symmetric regulation to all operators – whoever is first to construct within a building is required to provide shared access to competitors. Consultations since then culminated in the August 2008 Economic Modernisation Law (EML) (‘Loi de modernisation de l’économie’), which included provisions for sharing the end part of networks, a part which cannot be economically duplicated.
The law forms a key component of France’s regulatory framework designed to achieve widespread deployment of FttH. It adopted several European Commission (EC) telecoms competition recommendations, formalised France Telecom’s obligations to provide access to its civil infrastructure and increased the obligations of operators to allow access to in-building fibre. In this sense, it included the framework for agreements between operators and building owners or managers, covering the rôle of the building operator who installs and operates fibre in a property.
Having taken their cue from the regulator, operators themselves have now stepped up a gear: three of the main players – Numéricable, Orange and SFR – have agreed the conditions for sharing fibre in buildings installed by any of them. A ‘single mode’ solution will be built in areas where they deploy their networks, through which residences will be linked with fibre allocated to any of the three operators chosen by the subscriber. ‘Multi mode’ fibres will also be deployed in parts of Paris and neighbouring towns, consisting of four fibres per residence so that each operator can connect to their own network at the shared access point. The agreement is not exclusive, since any other operator is able to become involved.
The move is a major step in operator cooperation, and takes the country closer to the ideal of open access to the country’s developing NGNs. While the EML spoke volumes for the mindset which has encroached upon the French regulators, this cooperation among operators shows their understating of their future profit base, which will be not so much in owning the network but in leasing capacity.
For more information, see separate reports:
January 31st, 2009 at 8:00 am
[...] “France’s fibre operators fall in line with regulator” – French operators, with a little help from the regulator, decided to share infrastructure; very interesting analysis from the BuddeBlog. [...]