Let more optics replace copper

5/5/2008, A friend of mine who works in Shanghai Telecom told me, “Let more optics replace copper”(or Optics advance and Copper backward) was a very hot topic in China Telecom today. Many local China Telecom branches are eager to replace the copper network with new PON network. They even fund the PON project by selling the old copper network equipments.
“Let more optics replace copper” is a concept introduced by Mr. Wei leping, CTO of China Telecom. In the FTTH forum hold in Beijing this March, Mr. Wei talked about FTTH again. And this time, he really showed some different ideas.
First, He pointed out that FTTH should become a national strategy. He also said he once introduced FTTH and 4G mobile communication to the leaders of China. But the politicians chose 4G instead of FTTH. Secondly, Wei said that without IPTV service open to telecom service providers, there is no real FTTH development in China. Thirdly, he thought that China Telecom can provide bandwidth more than 50-100Mbps to subscribers. As I know, He once said 30Mbps was enough for China Telecom. And the fourth problem, there are some negative ideas about FTTx inside China Telecom. Some officers are more familiar to copper network than optical network. Anyway, by the concept of “Let more optics replace copper”, there has been already a very good environment for optical products suppliers in China. The first beneficiaries are those fiber cable manufactures. When can we see that PON equipments suppliers, even component suppliers get profit from these? That will be the real success of this concept.