FTTH shipments decrease 1% compared with Q2 – study
FTTH shipments were down 1 percent from the first quarter, as the Japanese market reaches cruising speed and Verizon worked off a build up in inventory, according to a report from Dittberner. Japan provided 81 percent of the market in the third quarter, down from 83 percent in the second quarter. Japan has added 3 million FTTP subscribers annually, which was its goal, and is expected to be the average growth for the next ten years. Verizon is the largest FTTH installation outside of Japan, and even though it increased subscribers for its FTTH service, FiOS, by 32 percent, shipments to it decreased.Four of the top five leaders in shipments, Mitsubishi (44%), Sumitomo (29%), Hitachi (8%) and UTStarcom (6%), are all main suppliers to Japan. Tellabs (9%), who is Verizon’s main FiOS supplier, is the third place vendor. Europe is showing signs of activity with a municipal network in Amsterdam and pilots in Paris with Free and France Telecom. Kuwait has a project underway that should provide 80,000 FTTH subscribers over the next 9 months. Smaller operators in the US added 125,000 subscribers in 3Q06, while Verizon added 147,000 FiOS subscribers.
APAC is the only region that is doing a large number of FTTP installations. In Japan, about 40 percent of the subscribers are in Multi-dwelling Units. APAC also differs in the technology being used. APAC is deploying GePON, while Verizon, until now, has deployed BPON. GPON will start to be deployed by Verizon in 2007, and is becoming the technology of choice by service providers in Europe, where active Ethernet had been the bulk of the installations. With Japan having reached its target implementation rate, growth in FTTH will probably slow until other major service providers join Verizon in rolling out FTTH. Major project announcements by North American and European Tier 1 service providers are likely as GPON technology becomes widely available and the desire to offer advanced TV services like HDTV and VOD increases. Dittberner expects that GPON usage will continue to grow and become the dominant technology for FTTH.
Source- telecompaper Wireless Mobile Telecom
ReCellular, Vivo in mobile phone recycling scheme in Brazil
Collector, reseller and recycler of used cellphones and accessories ReCellular has formed a two-year partnership with Brazilan mobile operator Vivo to safely and securely recycle retired cellphones to ensure environmentally-friendly disposal. The launch of the recycling program is due in early-November in 58 stores in three major cities including 15 locations in Rio de Janeiro, 11 locations in Brasilia and 32 locations in Sao Paulo. The partnership will expand to in-store collection at up to over 4,000 collection points throughout Brazil. Once the cellphones are received by ReCellular, they will be put through the Cell Phone Data Eraser program to erase all previous data stored on the phone prior to reuse.
