Speaker:
Robert J. Whitman — Program Manager, FTTx North America, Corning Cable Systems

Now that Fiber-to the-Home is well established as a technology, the focus of industry efforts needs to shift to the growing pains and new challenges facing network operators with a new network. The vendor community has been accused of loving and leaving—convince me to build, sell me your products and services, and now I’m left own my own. For the most part, equipment vendors can’t help with the new set of challenges network operators face — but other network operators can. One difficulty in bringing to light the challenges they are facing is that the network operators are too busy deploying their new networks and fighting daily fires to spend time writing articles and speaking at conferences. A compounding factor is that most operators don’t want to talk about their challenges in public forums. If we as an industry want the FTTH market to continue its success we have to get these challenges out in the open for discussion and debate.

In order to bring operational challenges to light, Whitman undertook an unusual and extensive project —conducting interviews with network operators, infrastructure providers, and service providers on the major challenges they were facing — in particular challenges brought about by their success in meeting their initial objectives. To help insure their openness and candor in exploring and airing their challenges, Whitman granted the operators with whom he spoke anonymity. Those that form the basis of his study and this keynote are big and small, public and private, with business models of both closed and open access. From cash flow, to personnel, to customer service, here are the challenges that confronted successful deployers, along with their insights gained about how others can profit from their hard-won experience.