21285 - SCTE Broadband Dec2021 COMPLETE v1

39 Vol. 43 No. 4 - November 2021 Issue a long time. The government has since set up a national broadband initiative to fund the fibre rollout across these areas. Another mechanism to get government muscle behind a rural fibre rollout is to show that there will be a high adoption rate. This occurred in Lower Austria, a province which is very rural. State-owned infrastructure company nöGIG deployed fibre in this rural area on an open access model. The notable thing about this is that adoption was extremely high; even before the rollout 50% of the homes had signaled their interest in adoption. This is different than deploying in urban areas, where you have alternative technologies such as coax cable. Deployment may be more expensive, but with high adoption rates – a monopoly in fact – rural is an interesting case, simply because there is no alternative. In the case of nöGIG, they were so confident of their ROI, they only asked for a government loan rather than funding, because they truly believed in the commercial case. We know deploying fibre in rural is expensive, due to longer distances between houses, but this also means that the opportunities for cost optimisation are significant. There is room to optimise materials, architecture, splitter schemes, types of cables, there are cables with a lower attenuation per kilometre, which means you can go further with the same cable, these and other technological optimisations can help significantly lower costs in a rural deployment. Not to forget that using automation tools also helps to get the design right the first time, so that time and money can be saved on the construction side. We have helped optimise those architectures using Comsof Fiber. However, even if each country had all the regulatory backing and all the funds in place to get going immediately on their fibre roll outs, there is still the issue of a skills and labour shortage. The biggest challenge that we now face due to the acceleration of the fibre market, is ensuring supply can keep pace with the demand for materials and skilled labour. The latest report from the FTTH Council noted that the availability of skilled labour to build out new fibre networks is beginning to be felt in late 2020. The growth of fibre which is expected in 2021 and 2022 will make the skills shortage more pronounced. Let’s talk about what this means in more concrete terms. Construction is seen as a bottle neck for many rollout programs as there is a serious skills shortage. In the US, there have been efforts to circumnavigate this problem, by employing pre-connected plug and play fibre solutions for example, something similar could also be implemented in Europe. Obviously, investment needs to go into training a skilled labour force, which is a great opportunity for local economies, as mentioned before, and these skills will be in high demand for many years to come. There is also a case for automation for the construction portion of the rollout. There are many companies who have tools on the market that help make deployment more efficient, and therefore make the best use of the skilled labour that’s available. But the skills shortage doesn’t just stop with construction. There is also a shortage of skilled network designers across the globe. The profiles needed for these jobs are highly skilled, and very niche; it takes years before a designer can produce network plans that are high quality. It is possible to amass a team of more junior designers, but with the demand for high quality designs, and fast, the risk of producing lower quality designs rises, which will ultimately incur huge costs on the construction side as mistakes are inevitable. To maintain the quality, highly skilled people are needed, but we simply don’t have enough designers in the industry to keep pace with the demand we from the industry 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.