Until recently, broadband in France meant digital subscriber line (DSL) or, marginally, coaxial cable. But that’s changing as competitors across the country race to deploy fiber, recognizing that fiber to the home (FTTH) has become the architecture of the future — and that quick action needs to be taken to prevent competitors from getting to the customer first.
At Neuf Cegetel, we have been delivering broadband services to French consumers for ten years — as a wholesaler in the first few years, and as a retailer since then. In the development of our fiber strategy, we were determined to win marketshare as cost-effectively as possible. That’s why, rather than adopting a blanket approach to fiber, we have chosen to make our deployment decisions on a local, case-by-case basis, alternating between gigabit passive optical networking (GPON) and point-to-point (P2P) Ethernet. From our perspective, flexibility is one of the service provider’s greatest assets in the fiber migration era.
This article outlines our experience of deploying fiber in France’s highly competitive telco environment.