With copper theft on the rise due to the value of the metal used in communications equipment, a component manufacturer has developed an alternative cable which uses less copper.
The number of broadband subscribers worldwide rose by 3.08 per cent (or 17.4 million lines) during the third quarter of 2011 to reach a total of 581.3 million, according to new figures prepared for the Broadband Forum by Point Topic.
Virgin Media, the UK cable broadband operator, announced that it has completed a successful trial delivering speeds of 1.5Gpbs over its existing cable infrastructure. The trial was conducted on a single road in London called Old Street, part of an area that has been dubbed the ‘Silicon Roundabout’ by members of the local tech community known as the ‘TechHub’.
US cable operator Comcast, has demonstrated a broadband network running at 1Gbps on the downlink. The company’s chief executive officer Brian L. Roberts gave the demo at the National Cable & Telecoms Association (NCTA) 2011 show in Chicago, by downloading 23 episodes of the US television show 30 Rock, representing nine hours of content, in around 90 seconds.
The need for expensive fibre-to-the-home technology could well be staved off with the news that cable could be pushed to deliver multi-gigabit speeds. Cable equipment supplier Arris said at that the NCTA 2011 show in Chicago on June 14-16 it would demonstrate data transfers of up to 4.5Gbps running over an upgraded DOCSIS network.
The telecoms industry in the Gulf region is in the throes of change with mobile markets becoming more competitive and saturated. As a result the big players are expanding into Africa and Asia Pacific to continue growing, but there is also a need for more domestic capacity to support growth and home in both the mobile and fixed markets.
National incumbent operators such as BT and Deutsche Telekom have been caught on the back foot by cable carriers and their bundled offerings, with analysts expecting a mass deployment of fibre in a bid to avoid large scale subscriber loss.
UK communications watchdog Ofcom published the results of its research into fixed line broadband speeds in the UK on Tuesday, and it makes disappointing reading.