The number of Dutch consumer VoIP subscriptions grew 2.8 percent during the third quarter, to 3.43 million at the end of September 2009, according to Telecompaper’s Dutch Fixed Telephony Q3 2009 report. The growth was driven by cable VoIP, with 3.2 percent growth during the quarter, while DSL reported quarterly growth of 2.1 percent, picking up compared with 1.4 percent during the second quarter of 2009.

The total fixed telephony market grew by slightly more than 16,000 connections during the third quarter of 2009 to 5.96 million, despite a 3.8 percent drop in PSTN/ISDN connections to 2.106 million on 30 September 2009. The number of Wholesale Line Rental (WLR) users grew by around 1.4 percent during the quarter to 421,000 on 30 September 2009.

“While VoIP growth is slowing, we estimate a 3 percent increase in subscriber numbers for the fourth quarter of 2009, reaching 3.5 million users by year-end,” said Kamiel Albrecht, Senior Analyst at Telecompaper and the report’s author. “For 2010, we expected quarterly growth of between 2.5 and 3 percent.”

KPN saw its share of the Dutch digital telephony market decrease by 0.2 percentage points during the quarter to 34 percent on 30 September 2009. Ziggo is second with 27.5 percent market share, growing by 0.5 points during the quarter, and UPC remained third at 17.4 percent, despite a drop of 0.4 percentage points.

Thomson announced that four products from its innovative customer premises equipment portfolio have received CAT-iq1 certification: a European operator's customized gateway and handset hardware foundation running a generic Thomson software release, and Thomson's generic TG797 DSL gateway and TH52 DECT handset products. Thomson is therefore the company with the largest number of certified CAT-iq products worldwide. This once again demonstrates Thomson's commitment to open standards as well as its cutting-edge expertise in DECT technology.

Headed up by the DECT Forum and uniting the worlds of telephony and broadband, CAT-iq (Cordless Advances Technology - internet and quality), is the global technology for wireless broadband home connectivity.

Meeting the requirements of the new technology standard for advanced IP services in next generation home networks, the third product, the DSL gateway TG797 is the first such platform worldwide to receive CAT-iq certification and is accompanied by a fully-featured DECT handset, the Thomson TH52. Also certified, this DECT phone is the perfect handset for family and everyday use, as it combines high quality sound and value added services with a friendly and ergonomic design.

" Thomson is an active member of the DECT Forum and as the worldwide leader for customer premises equipment is acutely aware of the benefits to our customer base that such advanced home connectivity standardization can bring ", said Pascal Portelli, Vice President Gateways & Connected Devices at Thomson. " The deployment of our CAT-iq certified devices, is testimony both to the quality and pioneering nature of Thomson's broadband solutions and to the need for this important industry standard."

Need for Standard Already Anticipated by Thomson Anticipating the arrival of this new standard, Thomson's portfolio of pioneering terminals included from the outset devices which were in line with CAT-iq specifications defined to date including its range of DECT phones and gateways. All feature High Definition sound. On top of this standard, Thomson is developing a set of advanced telephony services such as RSS feed and network address book synchronization.

With the evolving needs of network operators in mind, Thomson is implementing CAT-iq into a significant number of products in its CPE portfolio thus driving further interoperability between devices in the market and allowing deployment of advanced services through the interconnection of a greater proliferation of CAT- iq consumer devices with CAT-iq enabled gateways.

In countries such as Korea and Japan, the rapid take-up of FTTH/B and subsequent decline of ADSL technologies is nothing new. However, this network evolution is now spreading outside of Asia, and a number of western countries will start to see a rapid increase in FTTH/B and thus a decline in ADSL over the next couple of years. Most notable examples are the US, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands.

Access-fibre deployment is not just confined to ‘developed countries’. A number of emerging markets such as China and Malaysia also have very ambitious FTTH/B projects. “Even if we take into account an element of government and vendor hype for these markets, Ovum still forecasts a rapid take-up of advanced broadband services in those countries”,  Michael Philpott, Practice Leader of Ovum’s Consumer team. This take-up of next-generation access technologies such as FTTH and FTTB will see traditional DSL technologies saturate at around 320 million lines in the residential market by 2014, with FTTH/B still growing fast at over 160 million lines by the end of the same year. In Asia-Pacific the move to FTTH/B will be even more pronounced, with FTTH/B connections overtaking DSL to be the leading technology in 2014.

It’s not all bad news for DSL vendors
Although the worldwide market for at least ADSL technology will slow over the next five years, there are still significant opportunities for DSL vendors. Not all countries have yet announced FTTH/B initiatives and so will see significant growth in DSL over Ovum’s forecast period. “Eastern Europe, South and Central America, and Middle East and Africa will still be good growth regions for DSL operators, and thus vendors, for some years to come”, adds Mr Philpott, based in London.

Secondly, not all NGA developments are pure FTTH/B. A number, such as Japan, are actually a good mix of NGA technologies, with the advanced DSL technology VDSL2 often being used in the final few hundred meters to connect apartments and individual homes to the fibre network. Other NGA developments, such as in Belgium and the UK, will be predominantly fibre to the cabinet and then again VDSL2 in the final mile. Such NGA deployments are actually good news for DSL-based vendors as they signify the upgrade of millions of homes from ADSL line cards located in local exchanges to VDSL line cards located in street cabinets.

Thirdly, although worldwide growth will come to a standstill, there will still be over 360 million DSL lines (including business lines) in operation in 2014, with maintenance contracts running for many years to come beyond that. In Asia-Pacific however DSL connections peak in 2011.

Mobile broadband also applies pressure
The migration to FTTH/B is not the only phenomenon to stall DSL growth. By the end of 2014 worldwide consumer fixed broadband penetration will have reached only 34% of households. In theory there should therefore be plenty of growth opportunity for all fixed broadband technologies including FTTH/B. However, a large percentage of these remaining households do not have a fixed line, and whereas at one time it would have been assumed that investment in broadband would have pushed fixed lines out further, with mobile broadband devices and services becoming more readily available and affordable this will no longer be the case – at least in the medium term.

Mobile broadband has in effect set a lower ceiling for fixed broadband than what would have been predicted only 12 months ago. Whether this ceiling is permanent or not is yet to be seen. Although mobile broadband impacts fixed broadband in emerging markets more, it is not completely restricted to such countries. Western Europe, Austria, Finland, Italy and the Netherlands will all saturate at 65% of households or lower.

• Annual growth of residential gateway shipments plummeted in 2008 to only 0.5%, down from 2007’s heady growth of nearly 32%.
• Unit shipments of cable modems with an embedded multimedia terminal adapter (E-MTA) dropped to 15.2 million units in 2008.
  

DSL remains the dominant broadband access technology, accounting for 59.8% of fixed broadband connections in the 30 countries of the OECD at the end of 2008.
For the first time since the technology came to the mass-market, however, the majority of net additions during 2008 were not DSL, which accounted for only 46.2% of new fixed broadband lines, according to the latest research figures released by Analysys Mason, global adviser to the telecoms, IT and media industries. (www.analysysmason.com).
 
According to research by Analysys Mason, cable is taking a growing share of new connections and, despite the economic downturn, residential
fibre-to-the-home(FTTH) is also gaining line share.

“Operators are competing in one or more of three areas: price, speed or content and services,” explains Martin Scott, Senior Analyst at Analysys Mason.

“Cable operators have at least a marginal advantage in all three of these areas, but content and services is their true advantage. Cable operators frequently have larger content portfolios and longer-standing relationships with rights holders. Because at the core of their service bundles they have TV, spend on which seems to be relatively protected in the recession, cable operators are likely to be best positioned to maintain their share of net additions in 2009.”

Scott says that, while 8Mbit/s is considered ‘fast enough’ by consumers in many markets, this speed is only achievable on a small proportion of lines that use ADSL. Cable operators following the DOCSIS3.0 upgrade route to next-generation access (NGA) often find it less costly than DSL operators to build fibre closer to the home, which often makes cable’s case for ultrafast broadband appear much more attractive than that of telcos, he explains.

“DSL may be losing net additions across the OECD in general, but France, Germany and Mexico still demonstrate a strong bias towards DSL, so it appears that there are still quite a few years left for the world’s dominant broadband access technology. Advances such as dynamic spectrum management (DSM) are still being made.”

AT&T announced on April 1st a plan to sell a subsidized netbook in Atlanta for $50. As typically done in the wireless industry, the subsidized price requires a service agreement. In this case, agreeing to pay $60/month to AT&T will not only get the user a $50 netbook and 200MB a month of data on its mobile network, but also a DSL connection for the home and access to the company’s Wi-Fi hotspot locations. Since this was first announced during CTIA, all the focus has been on the wireless portion of the announcement, and the selling of a notebook in a traditional cellular phone manner. What has been totally overlooked is the combination of home and on the go broadband access as a single service. In-Stat feels the combining of home and on-the-go broadband is just as important a trend as the selling of subsidized netbooks.

“With growth in new home broadband service subscribers slowing, providers will need to steal existing broadband users away from other providers if they want to continue to grow their customer base,” says Daryl Schoolar, In-Stat analyst. “Our research shows that current broadband users would be willing to switch from their current broadband provider to one that could combine a home and on-the-go service. Clearwire has been using this strategy since last September to win subscribers in its two WiMAX markets.”

In a survey conducted in 2008 In-Stat found the following:

• Over 80% of respondents said they had some level of willingness to switch from their current broadband provider to one that combines both home and on-the-go service.
• Over 40% of respondents said they would be willing to pay their current home broadband provider an extra $10-15 a month for a home and on-the-go service. 
• Network performance is important to users. Over 40% of both Wi-Fi hotspot and 3G laptop data users said they had been discouraged from using wireless broadband in the past due to poor or slow network performance. 

SiTel Semiconductor today announced it is jointly developing Integrated Access Device (IAD) reference designs with Broadcom Corporation, a global leader in semiconductors for wired and wireless communications. The new designs will combine Broadcom’s Digital Subscriber Line (xDSL) gateway chipsets and SiTel’s DECT / CAT-iq solutions, allowing manufacturers to get to market faster with feature-rich and energy-efficient consumer premises equipment (CPE).

 
Data from electronics industry analysts IMS Research suggests that the number of DSL broadband internet users in the world will rise from 234 million in 2007 to 407 million by 2013. During the same period, the proportion of IADs shipped that include DECT or CAT-iq functionality is projected to grow from 4% to 31%, with the advanced features and better sound quality of CAT-iq replacing the elder technology entirely by rount 2012

.

For every ten gateways shipped, between five and seven additional handsets are expected to be bought. When buying additional handsets, consumers will make their choice based on features, aesthetics and price. They will expect any additional handsets to work correctly with their broadband access device. In addition to the improved voice quality, it is the interoperability challenge that is driving the move to CAT-iq.

But it is the combination of ultra-low power and proven low-cost that makes DECT ideal as the radio interface for a low / medium bit rate wireless LAN (WLAN) in the smart home environment. From wireless metering to door phones and safety / emergency system sensors, there is a whole host of systems in today’s home that will benefit from the cost and infrastructure benefits that DECT and specifically CAT-iq deliver.

Through this cooperation, Broadcom and SiTel aim to ensure that all the necessary technologies can be easily and seamlessly integrated to speed development times and reduce the design resources manufactures need.