ANGA Cable 2010 – Cologne. Cable’s focus for the immediate future will be to compete for the digital home, said Liberty Global’s and Cable Europe’s Manuel Kohnstamm in his Keynote speech. In the recent past, cable operators have been competing with the telcos on broadband speed access with the famous tagline “cable starts where DSL ends.” Now the Digital Home will be the next arena of competition.
“Beyond speed we will now integrate the digital home.” This will be achieved by putting together convincing proposition for digital TV. Not just digital TV but interactive digital TV. In the Digital Home there will be room for over the top on the TV set as well as on the PC, portable TV and TV on many different set-tops around the home and of course Ethernet Connected TVs.
“We fall back in love with TV. We will introduce advanced TV services, which will integrate with broadband. And we will extend cooperation with content providers.” Focal points will include more personalisation and in-house IP integration.
During the past five, six years cable has acted as the catalyst for NGA investments. “Where we introduce these speeds of 120 Mbps and more, VDSL and fibre speeds are increased. We see that in areas where cable penetration is high, it pushed broadband penetration.”
Broadband everywhere is a goal advocated by many politicians “They want 120 Mbps everywhere, but that is not how it goes. What most customers buy is gravitating between 20 and 30 Mbps. There is a sweet spot at 25 – 25 Mbps for €25. But remember, this was not something that was given to us. We now benefit from structural investments. Cable operators invested about 22 billion for the past 5 or 6 years. We have seen an over-investment on cable side, under-investment on the telecom side. Germany was slow to start to have impact for true broadband speeds, but now German cable is catching up very quickly.”
