PRESS RELEASE: ZTE Corporation has announced that its vice president Michael Song has delivered a speech entitled “Road to Full Fiber Era” at the online symposium “Cable Next-Gen Europe Digital Symposium” organized by Light Reading on June 22nd, a telecommunications industry media.

With the rapid development of video services and the changes in user behaviors brought on by the pandemic, enjoying higher-quality home broadband services has become a long-term requirement of broadband users. How multiple service operators (MSOs) can address the challenges, rapidly expand services, attract users, and build differentiated competitiveness plays an important role in his speech. Furthermore, MSOs moving to fiber is an inevitable trend, and has increasingly become a consensus of the industry.

In the speech, Michael Song compared the technical capabilities of the optical network and the cable network from the perspectives of cost, technical evolution, network development and coverage. The fiber network based on PON has great advantages over the cable network in terms of bandwidth capability, availability and cost.

As the next-generation technology of PON, 10G PON has a mature industry chain, and has started large-scale deployment, both of which have laid a solid foundation for the MSOs’ fiber transformation. This consensus has been validated by the development performance of the global FTTx market.

According to the latest data of Omdia, the number of global FTTx users in the world had exceeded 717 million by the end of 2020, accounting for nearly 60% of broadband users. In Europe where copper is widely deployed, more and more countries list fiber network construction as a national development strategy.

For example, the UK has planned to achieve nationwide FTTH coverage by 2033, and Italy has expressed explicitly that fiber network is a strategic solution for 100 Mbps connection. Michael Song added that, from a global perspective, countries in the Asia-Pacific region, typically like China, have actually taken a leading position in the FTTx construction process.

Additionally, some leading MSOs have been devoted to the construction and operation of FTTx networks, and have achieved good return on investment. There is a trend that more and more MSOs will join fiber transformation.

Michael Song expressed that ZTE, as a fixed network technology leader, has been working in the optical access field for years, and committed to bandwidth acceleration and application innovation. ZTE provides a full range of industry-leading optical access products and solutions to help MSOs implement end-to-end fiber transformation from central offices and ODNs to homes, thereby helping MSOs seize opportunities in the wave of optical fiber transformation, and achieving industry expansion and commercial success, as well as a win- win with customers.