China focusing on FTTH investments

Governments getting involved in fiber-to-the-home investments is becoming more common around the world with China joining the club of nations featuring mandates pertaining to FTTH installation. According to a recent China Daily report, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently declared that all new homes built in counties or districts that have fiber-optic networks installed have to be equipped with the infrastructure necessary to enable FTTH functionality.

The news source explained that the program's goal is to have at least 40 million homes connected to FTTH networks by 2015. The mandate will be enforced beginning on April 1, 2013.

Considering the impact of government FTTH investments
Good things often happen when governments get involved in FTTH, but the decisions are often controversial and can lead to lots of discussions in the country involved. Similar programs to the one in China have been used in Australia and New Zealand. The goal, generally speaking, is to reduce FTTH construction costs by ensuring that as much infrastructure as possible gets installed when homes are being built. 

In other countries, such as the United States, government bodies will subsidize network construction to get middle-mile infrastructure in place so telecoms have a foundation they can build on for FTTH projects. Regardless of the nature of the project, the costs can be high, but the benefits, at least from a telecom perspective, are substantial.

Looking at how government FTTH investments help telecoms
FTTH networks provide advanced performance functionality that can be valuable to consumers and business alike. However, difficult economic times combine with users that do not fully appreciate the benefits of such robust networks to make actual subscriptions to FTTH-based services hard to come by. This uncertain sales environment can make it difficult for telecoms to justify investments in FTTH from a fiscal perspective, slowing development in the sector. Government help can alleviate many of the costs associated with FTTH development, making it easier for telecoms to monetize the network system.

Using technology to control costs
Government help is not the only way to ensure cost-efficient FTTH installation. Working with the right supporting technologies, like fiber to Ethernet media converters, can go a long way toward enabling telecoms to easily and more affordably install FTTH infrastructure. Advanced media converters can also pay dividends by allowing telecoms to take advantage of advanced capabilities, like quality of service, within the network.

Perle has an extensive range of Managed and Unmanaged Fiber Media Converters to extended copper-based Ethernet equipment over a fiber optic link, multimode to multimode and multimode to single mode fiber up to 160km.