Tag: Iliad

Why fibre is on fire again

Introduction

Fibre to the home is growing at a near-explosive rate

Every company faces the problems of mature markets, disappointing revenues and tough decisions on investment. Everyone agrees that fibre delivers the best network experience, but until recently most companies rejected fibre as too costly.

Now, 15 of the world’s largest phone companies have decided fibre to the home is a solution. Why are so many now investing so heavily?

Here are some highlight statistics:

  • On 26th July 2018, AT&T announced it will pass 5 million locations with fibre to the home in the next 12 months, after reaching 3 million new locations in the last year.[1] Fibre is now a proven money-maker for the US giant, bringing new customers every quarter.
  • Telefónica Spain has passed 20 million premises – over 70% of the addressable population – and continues at 2 million a year.
  • Telefónica Brazil is going from 7 million in 2018 to 10 million in 2020.
  • China’s three giants have 344 million locations connected.[2]
  • Worldwide FTTH connections grew 23% between Q1 2017 and Q1 2018.[3]
  • In June 2018, China Mobile added 4.63 million broadband customers, nearly all FTTH.[4]
  • European FTTH growth in 2017 was 20%.[5]
  • In India, Mukesh Ambani intends to connect 50 million homes at Reliance Jio.[6]

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Even the most reluctant carriers are now building, including Deutsche Telekom and British Telecom. In 2015, BT Openreach CTO Peter Bell said FTTH was “impossible” for Britain because it was too expensive.[7] Now, BT is hiring 3,500 engineers to connect 3 million premises, with 10 million more homes under consideration.[8]

Credit Suisse believes that for an incumbent, “The cost of building fibre is less than the cost of not building fibre.”

Contents:

  • Executive Summary
  • Introduction
  • Fibre to the home is growing at a near-explosive rate
  • Why the change?
  • Strategies of leading companies
  • Frontrunners
  • Moving toward rapid growth
  • Relative newcomer
  • The newly converted
  • Alternate carriers
  • Naysayers
  • U.S. regionals: CenturyLink, Frontier and Windstream
  • The Asian pioneers
  • Two technologies to consider
  • Ten-gigabit equipment
  • G.fast
  • The hard question: How many will decide to go wireless only?

Figures:

  • Figure 1: Paris area fibre coverage – Orange has covered most of the capital
  • Figure 2: European fibre growth
  • Figure 3: Top five European incumbents, stock price July 2016 – July 2018
  • Figure 4: DT CEO Tim Höttges and Bavarian Prime Minister Dr. Markus Söder announce a deal to fibre nearly all of Bavaria, part financed by the government

[1] https://www.fastnet.news/index.php/11-fib/715-at-t-fiber-run-rate-going-from-3m-to-5m-year

[2] https://www.fastnet.news/index.php/8-fnn/713-china-1-1b-4g-400m-broadband-328m-fibre-home-rapid-growth

[3] http://point-topic.com/free-analysis/world-broadband-statistics-q1-2018/

[4] https://www.chinamobileltd.com/en/ir/operation_m.php

[5] http://www.ftthcouncil.eu/documents/PressReleases/2018/PR%20Market%20Panorama%20-%2015-02-2018-%20FINAL.pdf

[6] https://www.fastnet.news/index.php/11-fib/703-india-unreal-jio-wants-50m-ftth-in-1100-cities

[7] G.fast Summit May 2015

[8] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/feb/01/bt-openreach-hire-3000-engineers-drive-to-fill-broadband-not-spots

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Innovation Leaders: Iliad – A Disruptive Operator Tackles The Cloud

Introduction

To understand how disruptive Iliad’s approach to cloud services is, it is useful to consider it within the wider context of operator cloud services and technology strategies.

Although telecoms operators have often talked a good game when it comes to offering enterprise cloud services, most have found it challenging to compete with the major dedicated and Internet-focused cloud providers like Rackspace, Google, Microsoft, and most of all, Amazon Web Services. Smaller altnets and challenger mobile operators – and even smaller incumbents – have struggled to find enough scale, while even huge operators like Telefonica or Verizon have largely failed to differentiate themselves from the competition. Further, the success of the software and Internet services cloud providers in building hyperscale infrastructure has highlighted a skills gap between telcos and these competitors in the data centre. Although telcos are meant to be infrastructure businesses, their showing on this has largely been rather poor.

In our earlier 2012 Strategy Report Cloud 2.0: Telco Strategies in the Cloud, we pointed to differentiation as the biggest single challenge for telco cloud services. The report argued that the more telcos bought into pre-packaged technology solutions from vendors like VMWare, the less control over the future development path of their software they would have, and the more difficult it would be for them to differentiate effectively. We show the distinction in Figure 1 (see the Technology section of the heatmap). Relying heavily on third-party proprietary technology solutions for cloud would give telcos a structural disadvantage relative to the major non-telco cloud players, who either develop their own, or contribute to fast-evolving open-source projects.

We also observed in that report that nearly all the operators we evaluated who were making any effort to compete in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), had opted to resell VMWare technology.

Looking back from 2016, we observe that the operators who went down this route – Verizon is a prime example – have not succeeded in the cloud. The ones that chose to own their technology, building the skills base internally by contributing to the key open-source projects, like AT&T (with its commitment to the OpenStack solution), or who became a preferred regional partner for the major cloud providers (like Telstra), have done much better.

Figure 1: Telco strategies in the cloud, 2012 – most providers go with VMWare-based solutions

Source: STL Partners, Cloud 2.0 Strategy Report

AT&T’s strategy of using the transition to cloud to take control of its own technology, move forward on the SDN/NFV tech transition, and re-organise its product line around its customers’ needs, has helped to set its revenue from strategic business services powering ahead of its key competitor, Verizon, as Figure 2 shows.

Figure 2: Getting the cloud right pays off at AT&T Strategic Business Services

Source: STL Partners

The above is the opening of the report’s introduction, which goes on to outline our views on the cloud market and reprise telcos’ opportunity and progress in it. To access the other 23 pages of this 26 page Telco 2.0 Report, including…

  • Executive Summary
  • Introduction
  • Iliad: A Champion Disruptor
  • Cloud at Iliad
  • Responding to cloud market disruption: Iliad draws on its hi-lo segmentation experience
  • Scaleway: Address the start-ups and scale-ups
  • Dedibox Power 8: doubling down on the high end
  • Nodebox: build-your-own network switches
  • Financial impact for Iliad
  • Conclusions

…and the following report figures…

  • Figure 1: Telco strategies in the cloud, 2012 – most providers go with VMWare-based solutions
  • Figure 2: Getting the cloud right pays off at AT&T Strategic Business Services
  • Figure 3: AWS is not just a price leader
  • Figure 4: STL Partners’ cloud adoption forecast
  • Figure 5: Free Mobile’s growth repeatedly surprises on the upside
  • Figure 6: Free Mobile’s 4G build overtakes SFR
  • Figure 7: Free Mobile is a top scorer on our network quality metrics
  • Figure 8: Free Mobile’s customer satisfaction ratings are excellent
  • Figure 9: Specs for ‘extreme performance’ Dedibox server models
  • Figure 10: The C1 ‘Pimouss’ microserver
  • Figure 11: 18 C1s close-packed in a standard server blade
  • Figure 12: Scaleway Hosted C1 Server Pricing
  • Figure 13: The case for more POWER8: IBM POWER8 vs Intel x86 E5
  • Figure 14: A Nodebox, Free’s internally developed network switch
  • Figure 15: A useful business, if no AWS

Free-T-Mobile: Disruptive Revolution or a Bridge Too Far?

Free’s Bid for T-Mobile USA 

The future of the US market and its 3rd and 4th operators has been a long-running saga. The market, the world’s richest, remains dominated by the duopoly of AT&T and Verizon Wireless. It was long expected that Softbank’s acquisition of Sprint heralded disruption, but in the event, T-Mobile was simply quicker to the punch.

Since the launch of T-Mobile’s “uncarrier” price-war strategy, we have identified signs of a “Free Mobile-like” disruption event, for example, substantial net-adds for the disruptor, falling ARPUs, a shakeout of MVNOs and minor operators, and increased industry-wide subscriber growth. However, other key indicators like a rapid move towards profitability by the disruptor are not yet in evidence, and rather than industry-wide deflation, we observe divergence, with Verizon Wireless increasing its ARPU, revenues, and margins, while AT&T’s are flat, Sprint’s flat to falling, and T-Mobile’s plunging.

This data is summarised in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Revenue and margins in the US. The duopoly is still very much with us

 

Source: STL Partners, company filings

Compare and contrast Figure 2, which shows the fully developed disruption in France. 

 

Figure 2: Fully-developed disruption. Revenue and margins in France

 

Source: STL Partners, company filings

T-Mobile: the state of play in Q2 2014

When reading Figure 1, you should note that T-Mobile’s Q2 2014 accounts contain a negative expense item of $747m, reflecting a spectrum swap with Verizon Wireless, which flatters their margin. Without it, the operating margin would be 2.99%, about a third of Sprint’s. Poor as this is, it is at least positive territory, after a Q1 in which T-Mobile lost money. It is not quite true to say that T-Mobile only made it to profitability thanks to the one-off spectrum deal; excluding it, the carrier would have made $215m in operating income in Q2, a $243m swing from the $28m net loss in Q1. This is explained by a $223m narrowing of T-Mobile’s losses on device sales, as shown in Figure 2, and may explain why the earnings release makes no mention of profits instead of adjusted EBITDA despite it being a positive quarter.

Figure 3: T-Mobile’s return to underlying profitability – caused by moderating its smartphone bonanza somewhat

Source: STL Partners, company filings

T-Mobile management likes to cite its ABPU (Average Billings per User) metric in preference to ARPU, which includes the hire-purchase charges on device sales under its quick-upgrade plans. However, as Figure 3 shows, this is less exciting than it sounds. The T-Mobile management story is that as service prices, and hence ARPU, fall in order to bring in net-adds, payments for device sales “decoupled” from service plans will rise and take up the slack. They are, so far, only just doing so. Given that T-Mobile is losing money on device pricing, this is no surprise.

 

  • Executive Summary
  • Free’s Bid for T-Mobile USA
  • T-Mobile: the state of play in Q2 2014
  • Free-Mobile: the financials
  • Indicators of a successful LBO
  • Free.fr: a modus operandi for disruption
  • Surprise and audacity
  • Simple products
  • The technical edge
  • Obstacles to the Free modus operandi
  • Spectrum
  • Fixed-mobile synergy
  • Regulation
  • Summary
  • Two strategic options
  • Hypothesis one: change the circumstances via a strategic deal with the cablecos
  • Hypothesis two: 80s retro LBO
  • Problems that bite whichever option is taken
  • The other shareholders
  • Free’s management capacity and experience
  • Conclusion

 

  • Figure 1: Revenue and margins in the US. The duopoly is still very much with us
  • Figure 2: Fully-developed disruption. Revenue and margins in France
  • Figure 3: T-Mobile’s return to underlying profitability – caused by moderating its smartphone bonanza somewhat
  • Figure 4: Postpaid ARPU falling steadily, while ABPU just about keeps up
  • Figure 5: T-Mobile’s supposed “decoupling” of devices from service has extended $3.5bn of credit to its customers, rising at $1bn/quarter
  • Figure 6: Free’s valuation of T-Mobile is at the top end of a rising trend
  • Figure 7: Example LBO
  • Figure 8: Free-T-Mobile in the context of notable leveraged buyouts
  • Figure 9: Free Mobile’s progress towards profitability has been even more impressive than its subscriber growth

 

Full Article: iFlood – How better mobile user interfaces demand Layer Zero openness

Networks guru Andrew Odlyzko recently estimated that a typical mobile user consumes 20MB of data a month for voice service, but that T-Mobile Netherlands reports their iPhone users consuming 640MB of data a month; so upgrading everyone to the Jesus Phone would increase the demand for IP bandwidth on cellular networks by a factor of 30.

It had in the past been estimated that major European cellular operators might be able to provide 500MB/user/month without another wave of network upgrades; if this calculation is at all typical, it looks like there is a substantial risk of an ”iPlayer event” hitting cellular in the near future. Recap: when the BBC placed vast amounts of its content on the Internet through its iPlayer service, DSL traffic in the UK spiked; or rather, it didn’t spike, the trend shifted permanently upwards.

That, of course, is much more worrying; because the marginal costs are set by the capacity needed to handle the peaks, a rise in average traffic means a boost to costs multiplied by the peak/mean ratio. An aggravating factor is the pricing structure for BT Wholesale backhaul service – the commits are 155Mbits/s, so if the new peak demand just exceeded your existing commit, you needed to buy a whole 155Mbits/s pipe. The impact on the UK unbundling/bitstream ISPs has been serious and the sector remains in a critical condition.

Traditionally, a mobile base station was provisioned with 2 E-1 leased lines, 2×2 Mbit/s capacity. Multiplied by 4, that’s 9,676,800 Mbits in a month. Divide by 8 to convert to MB, 1,181GB/1.15TB a month. Which means that a typical cell site could support at the most 1,832 users’ activity, or quite a lot less when you consider the peak/mean issue – typical values are 4:1 for GSM voice (458 users), but as high as 50:1 for IP (36!). Clearly, those operators who have had the foresight to pull fibre to the base stations and, especially, to acquire their own infrastructure will be at a major advantage.

The elements of traffic generation

The iPlayer event was an example of content push – what changed was the availability of a huge quantity of compelling content, which was also free. If Samsung’s recently announced video store takes off, that would be another example of content push. But this is far from the only driver of traffic generation, though. It is important to realise that the Internet video market is a tightly-coupled system. The total user experience is made up of content, of the user interface, of feedback and discovery mechanisms, of delivery over the network, and of the business model. All of them are very closely related – if the product is heavily DRM-restricted, prettying up the front end doesn’t help.

It is characteristic of a coupled system that the slowest-changing factor is the main constraint, but the fastest-changing factor is the driver of change. In this case, the slowest-changing factor is the infrastructure, and within that, the digs and poles of layer zero. Even the copper changes faster than that. The fastest-changing factor is the user interface, which can be changed at will. Sociability, discovery and the like, which require serious software development, are in the middle, with issues like BT Wholesale pricing some way below.

There was not much special about the iPhone technically; the first ones were 2G devices in a 3G world, and good luck to you trying to pull 640MB a month on GPRS alone. Is that even possible? Its integration with iTunes gave it access to content, but the cost issue meant that the bulk of the music on iPhones was probably downloaded over WLANs or sideloaded from a PC. But one thing that it did do very well was the user interface; Apple exploited its historic speciality in industrial design and GUI design to the limit. Typically, a lot of geeks and engineers scoffed at the gadget as an overdesigned bauble for big-kid hipsters; fools that we were.

But the core insight of the iPhone designers was to design for the Web and for rich media, probably helped by not having a telephony background. Therefore, they chose to cover as much of the form factor with a high quality screen as possible, and worked from there. They also made some advances in the GUI (zooming, gesture recognition), but the much talked about browser was less sensational. (Like all versions of Safari, it is based on the open-source WebKit engine that also makes the Nokia browser and Konqueror work.)

So we’re now beginning to see that changing the user interface can radically impact the engineering and economics of the network; and because it is a fast-changing element, it can do so faster than the network layer can react.

From receiving to sending

The Internet is a copying machine, they say; more to the point, it is usually a one-to-many medium that is experienced as a many-to-one medium. I draw content from many different sources according to the stuff I like; but each source is broadcasting itself to many readers. As a rule, people read more than they write, even if P2P distribution blurs this. One criticism of the iPhone is that it’s optimised for passive consumption of content; some users report their uplink/downlink ratio changing dramatically on changing to the iPhone.

Looking at another online-video sensation which hammers the ISP economy, YouTube, it’s quite clear that another driver of traffic is improved content ingestion. As whatever you place on the Web will be written relatively few times and read many times, there is a multiplier effect to anything that makes it easier to create or at least to distribute content.

YouTube’s innovation was three-fold; it made it dramatically simpler to upload video to the Internet, and it made it dramatically simpler to popularise it once it was there, through the embedding process and through its social functions. This latter feature meant there was much more of an incentive to upload stuff in the first place, because it was more likely to get viewed.

Better user interfaces and social mechanisms for content creation, then, are potentially major drivers of change in your cost model. They can change very quickly; and their impact is multiplied. Already, I can uplink photos to Flickr faster from my Nokia E71 than from my DSL link; granted, this is because of the UK’s lamentable infrastructure, but it shows some idea of the possibilities. Perhaps that Samsung device with the mini-decks might be less silly than we thought?

Faster adaptation: considered helpful

As we were wondering what would happen to the cellular networks’ backhaul bills, and contemplating the wreck of the DSL unbundler/bitstream business model, we looked enviously across the Channel to Telco 2.0’s favourite ISP, Iliad. They have just announced another set of fantastic figures; their margins are 70%-80% where they have deployed fibre, and their agility in launching new services doesn’t need to be rehearsed again. They even built their own content-creation service, after all; no fear of the future there.

What makes the difference? Iliad has always been committed to investing in engineering and infrastructure, giving it the agility to match the speed of change the application layer can achieve. It’s been determined to realise the OPEX and unbundling/wholesale savings from fibre deployment; and Iliad’s results have demonstrated that they are real and they are enough to fund deployment.

There is a crucial element, however, in their success; in France, access to duct and pole infrastructure is a regulated product, and major cities are more than keen on selling access to their own physical infrastructures – the sewers of Paris are the classic example. If you want to fix the ISP business model, fixing layer zero is the place to start, before the next fast-changing application knocks us back into the ditch.

Conclusions

  1. The ISP/telco market is a closely coupled system: An analysis in terms of differential rates of change shows that rapidly changing applications and user interfaces can have seismic impact on slowly changing network operator business models
  2. The benefits of fibre are real: Iliad is showing that fibre deployment isn’t just nice to have, it’s saving the ISP business model
  3. Open access to infrastructure is vital: There is no contradiction between applications/VAS and layer zero – instead they go together. If you want fantastic new apps, pick up a shovel.