European Incumbent Telcos’ Move to Vectoring to Boost Broadband Speeds Worries Rivals, Fiber Proponents
A request by Deutsche Telekom for regulatory permission to use vectoring on its copper network to make high-speed broadband available more quickly has encountered opposition from alternative providers and from fiber-to-the-home proponents worried about its impact on local loop unbundling. DT’s application to regulator BNetzA sparked an outcry earlier this month from three German telecom organizations, apparently leading the incumbent to offer concessions Wednesday. Advocates of vectoring say the technology, although transitional, may be the best solution for Europe, which has been slow to roll out fiber networks. Fiber proponents, however, say vectoring won’t offer the high broadband speeds promised and could hamper investment in new networks.
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Vectoring increases the capacity of a DSL service by “bonding” the multiple copper loops that have already been deployed to homes, networking and communications equipment provider Adtran told the U.S. FCC in an Oct. 12 letter. In VDSL technologies, the speed a network can achieve depends on how far away from a copper loop a customer is and on how much interference there is on the line, said Adtran Carrier Ethernet Product Line Manager Robert Conger in an interview. On loops longer than 1 km., loop length is the dominant factor; on shorter loops, the determining factor is the noise level, he said. The “cross-talk” severely affects broadband rates, but vectoring -- cross-talk cancellation -- gets rid of the noise, he said. On shorter loops, eliminating cross-talk will almost double broadband rates, he said.
The only way to implement vectoring from a practical perspective is to gain access to all sources of cross-talk in a given node, Conger said. Only a single operator can have a digital subscriber line access multiplexer (which connects many customer DSL interfaces to a high-speed communications channel) in a street cabinet for vectoring to work, he said. Regulators in Germany and elsewhere are looking to ban sub-loop unbundling (which gives alternative players access to the copper network) at the remote cabinet and move toward a bitstream model with a sole operator in the street cabinet to allow vectoring, he said.
The U.S. market doesn’t have much of a problem with vectoring because there’s no requirement for operators to unbundle their networks at remote cabinets, Conger said. Because operators have nodes all to themselves, fiber to the cabinet can be widely deployed, he said. In Europe, however, there’s less fiber to the cabinet due to economic and other factors, he said. Alternative providers are worried that if sub-loop unbundling is banned, they'll have to go through a single operator, generally the incumbent, for the physical network for higher-speed broadband services, he said. However, he said, one study showed that using VDSL2 and vectoring is substantially cheaper than building out fiber to the home (FTTH).
DT’s announcement this month that it will use vectoring exclusively prompted sharp criticism from the Federal Association of Broadband Communication (BREKO), Federation of Fiber Connectors and Association of Telecommunications and Value-Added Services (VATM). In a joint Dec. 11 position statement, they said vectoring in Germany will only reach its full potential if the new technology can be used by all market participants. They demanded that the regulator maintain access for them at the local loop at the street cabinet.
Just because DT uses vectoring doesn’t mean that local loop access throughout Germany should no longer be offered, VATM President Gerd Eickers said. That would create a new infrastructure monopoly, he said. DT’s plan unnerves investors, who have put various expansion projects on hold, said BREKO President Ralf Kleint. Already upgraded street cabinets become sunk investment if exclusive vectoring takes places, and agreed development projects can’t be put in place, he said.
DT responded Dec. 19, offering concessions it said will protect competitors’ investments and allow them to deploy their own vectoring as long as they, like DT, give others open access to the new connections. Belgian and Austrian authorities have already approved the use of the technology with the support of the European Commission, the telecom company said. DT will make a bitstream connection for vectoring available as a wholesale product so rivals can offer their customers double bandwidth, it said. “However, we also expect such an offer from alternative operators,” it said.
But the VATM said the concessions aren’t enough to resolve all the local loop access problems caused by vectoring. DT has, for example, set various exemptions for competitors’ access to the street cabinet, it said. The issue is still far from being resolved, it said.
Vectoring is just another step to extend “already dead copper lines” with quite limited success, FTTH Council Europe Director General Hartwig Tauber said in an interview. The marketing message behind vectoring is that broadband speeds can be hiked to 200 Mbps, he said. DT and other incumbents failed to invest in higher speeds, so when a company such as Cable Deutschland announced very high speeds, DT decided to vector, he said. However, the actual speed seems lower unless the customer is on a very short loop, he said. Moreover, DT’s bitstream offer means that the bandwidth is all under DT’s control, taking quality of service and other factors out of the hands of alternative operators, he said.
Fiber networks are already bringing the possibility of 1 Gbps, Tauber said. Moreover, while upgrading to vectoring appears less expensive than building a fiber network, it’s not if one takes into account the entire evolution of networks from their early stages to DSL, ADSL, VDSL and beyond, he said. It’s better to go straight from copper to fiber, he said. Tauber’s group is particularly worried that take-up of vectoring might slow fiber investment in Europe while the rest of the world upgrades to next-generation access networks, he said.
The decision to go to fiber comes down to the business case, Conger said. If companies can avoid trenching and can use aerial networks, they can make a good pitch to move forward with fiber. If they have to dig everywhere, it’s not practical, he said.
Vectoring is a transitional technology compared to fiber to the home, but there’s no VDSL3, just VDSL with vectoring, Conger said. For remote-cabinet VDSL, vectoring is it, he said. Everyone in Europe understands there’s no business case for fiber to the home, and that vectoring will be the best Europe will have for a long time unless fiber networks are heavily subsidized or there’s a change in the way operators can deploy fiber, he said.
From a regulatory standpoint, the unique nature of the technology requires that deployment be restricted to single operators, necessitating the ban on sub-loop unbundling, Conger said. The issue of the functional separation of a network from its services arm, akin to what happened in the U.K. with British Telecom and Open Reach, is something regulators and operators will have to address, he said.