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The Road from Copper to Fiber | What’s in Store for the European Telco?

Should telcos replace copper with fiber in the last mile?

Fiber optics is eliciting huge interest and enthusiasm among operators as a replacement for copper in “the last mile” (i.e. the final leg of delivering connectivity from a communications provider to a customer) to enable higher bandwidth access for consumers and encourage the uptake of a variety of data services. Fiber technologies are not new to telecom operators, who have deployed fiber in the backhaul infrastructure for decades. However, fiber in the last mile, in place of copper, is a relatively recent phenomenon, where operators are now trenching it closer to the home. While many operators embarked on this policy a number of years ago, in 1999–2000, the prohibitive cost of fiber and optical electronics at that time discouraged large-scale investments. Most operators therefore continued to concentrate on leveraging their existing copper assets by upgrading to ADSL. However, with the subsequent decline in fiber costs, along with a surge in bandwidth demand fuelled by broadband, video and TV, some operators are reconsidering their strategy for deploying fiber in the last mile access network.

In this report, Capgemini’s TME Strategy Lab evaluates whether European operators need to start replacing copper with fiber in their access infrastructure, and considers the fiber roll-out options available in view of deployment economics and bandwidth capacity.

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