FTTH Council Goes to Vienna

VIENNA -- Europe’s biggest trade event dedicated to future fibre-to-the-home technologies and deployments is launched in Vienna today, promising to be by far the most successful and captivating in its history. The FTTH Council Europe is anticipating a record number of delegates at its annual conference and exhibition with fibre-based broadband at perhaps its most crucial crossroads for many years. The choice of venue reflects the city’s continued progress in fibre deployments and coincides with Austria’s Presidency of the European Union during the first half of 2006.

Under the title ‘It’s clear…It’s fibre…It’s now!’ the conference will hear keynote presentations and case studies from senior representatives of the European Commission, European regulators, Deutsche Telekom, Telekom Austria, NTT, City of Vienna, Glasvezelnet Amsterdam, the World Bank, Walt Disney, Sony Entertainment, Microsoft, leading industry analyst firms and many others. Specific themes will include market forecasting for FTTH, applications for fibre-based content, the economics of fibre network building, business cases for FTTH project funding, approaches to reducing fibre building disruption, and fibre’s role in realising triple-play services.

“FTTH (fibre-to-the-home) and other fibre-based deployments across Europe are growing significantly, with operators benefiting from innovative approaches to infrastructure building, management and financing,” said Hartwig Tauber, President of the FTTH Council Europe. “Other regions of the world (e.g. the US & nations throughout Asia) are still far ahead of us in terms of their adoption of ultra-fast next generation broadband services, but we hope 2006 will be a crucial year in seeing this gap narrow.”

FTTH Council