Fiber to the home – an FTTH "battle of the houses"

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The experts at the Anga Com broadband trade fair in Cologne were unanimous: the expansion of multi-storey buildings with fiber to the home (FTTH) is a Herculean task. Of the 5 to 6 million households that currently surf the Internet via fiber optics, only one million are in apartment buildings. That leaves around 22 million homes still waiting for a fiber optic connection.

Costs in the billions

At the Anga Com fiber optic summit, Bernd Thielk, Managing Partner of willy.tel, posed the key question: Who is going to pay for it? Assuming that costs of 1,000 euros are incurred per fiber optic connection, a sum of 22 billion euros is on the table. In the end, the consumer pays for these costs through the price of their internet tariff. "Can the customer pay that, does the customer want to pay that?" asked Thielk at the event.

And this is by no means the only challenge when fiber optics are to be laid in houses, at network level 4 (NE4). The building owner is the consumer. "It's like a battle of the houses", said Thielk, who has been laying fiber optics in Hamburg with willy.tel for 20 years. There are many owners here with individual small houses. "You have to get in touch with each individual to get access", explained Thielk in Cologne.

Scaling urban NE4 expansion by a factor of 4

Network operators gain access via the landowner's declaration (GEE). Large housing companies are familiar with GEE, but for many small, sometimes private owners, it is a bureaucratic monster. "Obtaining the GEE is difficult", emphasized Nelson Killius, spokesman for the management of the Munich municipal utility subsidiary M-net. In the urban NE4 expansion, M-net has now shot a five-digit number of buildings with fiber optics. "That's okay, but we need to scale it up by at least a factor of four," explained Killius at Anga Com.

How can this be achieved? "The GEE needs to be streamlined and should contain as little legal text as possible", suggested OXG CEO Sören Trebst. Probably the more important aspect: better marketing. "I think it's wrong to only focus on speed", said Reinhard Sauer, CEO of Deutsche GigaNetz. Killius agrees: "We shouldn't be talking about bandwidth, but about what you get for it."

Switching off DSL from 2032 with a high fiber optic quota

In this way, fiber optic network operators could also set themselves apart from the competition from DSL and TV cable networks, which is also part of the "battle of the houses" in cities. "I'm not hopeful that these households will migrate extremely quickly", said Trebst. For him, one lever lies in finding cooperative solutions for fiber optic expansion on the NE4 together with the housing industry.

The other lever: a clear roadmap for the migration from DSL to fiber optic networks. "We are not taking away anyone's Internet connection", emphasized Killius. "Instead, we want to upgrade." He could imagine switching off DSL networks from 2032, provided there was a high level of fiber optic penetration in the same location. The panel agreed that a concrete timetable for copper-to-glass migration would accelerate FTTH expansion, including in apartment buildings. However, the new Ministry of Digital Affairs needs to develop such a roadmap.

(akn)