Consumers need to take the FTTH fight to their MPs

"Broadband will be viewed as narrowband in the future," says Sony Pictures

Consumers need to reach out to local MPs to raise awareness of fibre-to-the-home (FTTH), after the UK failed to even qualify for the FTTH Council's recent rankings.

The FTTH Council Europe is a not-for-profit organisation set up to lobby for a rollout of FTTH. Its FTTH Market Panaroma records the number of subscribers in each country across Europe and ranks them according to the percentage of homes taking a direct fibre line connection. It does not include BT's fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) approach.

To be included in the FTTH ranking, a country must have more than one per cent of households or a minimum of 200,000 households connected to FTTH. The number of UK households using FTTH stands at less than 0.1 per cent.

Number one in the rankings, Russia, added 2.2 million new FTTH subscribers in the second half of 2012 – more than all of the 27 member states of the EU combined, to reach a total of 7.5 million homes. Meanwhile, Lithuania had 100 per cent coverage of FTTH and more than 31 per cent of homes connected to fibre, and Sweden has 22.6 per cent of homes with FTTH subscriptions.

Chi Onwurah, Labour MP for Newcastle Central and shadow minister for the Cabinet Office told Computing that if the public wrote to their local MPs to find out more about the debate surrounding FTTH and FTTC, it would help to raise more of an awareness throughout government.

"Not only would [the member of the public] get a response but it would mean that the MP in question would have to look further into the matter and this in itself will raise awareness," she said.

"Clearly not all MPs have the knowledge but they will write to the minister responsible to find out more and that has got to be part of the objective."

During the official opening of the FTTH conference, Onwurah said FTTC, which is currently being deployed on a wide scale by BT, is not enough to help the UK's economy grow.

"I've heard we don't need FTTH because of vectoring the FTTC connections but the speeds fall off a cliff after 400m, meaning that this is a misuse of the message," she said.

Consumers need to take the FTTH fight to their MPs

"Broadband will be viewed as narrowband in the future," says Sony Pictures

Onwurah sympathised with BT in that if they were to invest in FTTH their share price would suffer.

"If BT was committed to putting £1bn a year into fibre for the next 10 years, the markets would not reward that," she said. "There is no reward for long-term investment."

Karin Ahl, president of the FTTH Council Europe told Computing that she cannot believe BT claimed that the public do not need FTTH.

"There needs to be a mutual understanding between government and BT that there is a need for it but it is government's responsibility to set out a vision and to support industry," she said.

Ahl pointed to the entertainment and content industry and internet based start-ups as examples of areas that need more bandwidth.

Mitch Singer, chief digital strategy officer at Sony Pictures, agreed with Ahl. His company is one of 80 signed up to digital rights authentication and cloud-based licensing system UltraViolet which has 10 million users in the US, and Singer believes that the service needs higher bandwidths afforded by FTTH as new technologies emerge.

"Anytime you start moving to a new patch you need the bandwidth on whatever device you are using," he told Computing. "The same goes for next-gen gaming devices where a lot of games will be streamed. When you move from HD into a 4K world, the ability to get the content to the home is going to be very important."

"Broadband will likely be viewed as narrowband in the future," Singer concluded.