21285 - SCTE Broadband Dec2021 COMPLETE v1

38 Vol. 43 No. 4 - November 2021 Issue Rural fibre rollouts Rural FTTH rollouts are a massive challenge for Europe. Only 22% of households in rural areas have been passed, which leaves a huge number of households that still don’t have access to fibre. Fibre will soon be the basic standard for digital life, firstly because more than 50% of all households in Europe have been passed, and secondly it provides a stable and fast internet connection. Between the COVID crisis which saw millions of workers across the continent teleworking, and with the UN decreeing that having access to the internet is a human right, which facilitates the right to education and the right to work, it’s up to Europe to implement an overarching strategy to ensure that both urban and rural households have access to fibre so that everyone has an equitable chance of civil participation. There are two big issues that spring out when addressing this issue, firstly how to meet the EU’s ambitious targets for rural fibre rollout amid a skills, labour and material shortage. Secondly, how to start to address the digital divide between rural and urban areas, particularly in a post-COVID world. To tackle FTTH rollout to rural areas the European Commission has implemented the “Gigabit Society 2025” and “Digital Compass 2030” initiatives, the first which aims to provide an internet connection of at least 100Mbps to all European households by 2025 and the second aims to have all European households covered by a Gigabit network. A report from the FTTH Council of Europe, “FTTH-B in Rural Areas”, found that these targets will drive full-fibre connectivity growth in both urban and rural areas. But how each country achieves this goal is on them. We can see that these rollouts aren’t uniform and are heavily dependent on government backing and funding. For instance, Germany only has 9%of its rural households passed compared to Spain, which has a 60.5% pass rate for rural households. The key to Spain’s success can be traced back to 2015 where Spain’s telecom regulatory body CNMC ruled that their telecoms giant, Telefonica, must open its fibre infrastructure to rivals in approximately three quarters of the country. Vodafone and Orange, among other providers began heavily investing in fibre rollouts, the end result being that Spain now is in the lead when it comes to homes passed in rural and urban areas. Another EU success story is in Ireland, where the government first identified regions where they believed there wouldn’t be any commercial development – which of course was mainly rural areas. At Comsof, we worked with Eir to evaluate the commercial viability of their rural areas and discovered there were 300,000 homes to be passed in rural Ireland, making it one of the largest infrastructure projects in the country for By Raf Meersman, CEO, Comsof are key to breaching the digital divide from the industry