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International Issue: June 2007
Light years apart
by Ken Wieland
The French and British often pride themselves on their differences. Flamboyancy and showmanship favoured by the French; restraint cherished by the British.
When it comes to broadband access, the respective incumbents of these two countries are showing similar differences in style. France Telecom has nailed its Orange colour to the FTTH (fibre-to-the-home) mast and is scheduled this summer to start extending the availability of commercial 100Mbps downstream services beyond Paris. Major cities to see FTHH will include Lille, Marseille, Poitiers and Toulouse.
If all goes well, France Telecom will embark on delivering broadband services over light wavelengths — via a GPON architecture — on a mass scale at the start of 2009.
BT, however, is far more cautious. The UK incumbent prefers to stick to ADSL2+ for the next few years and will roll that out alongside its 21CN, the all-IP core network that BT plans to replace its entire PSTN with by the end of 2011. Although only capable of a comparatively modest maximum downstream speed of 24Mbps (at least for those customers located less than 300 metres away from the DSLAM), BT says that ADSL2+ is sufficient for customers’ bandwidth needs in the foreseeable future.
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