In Latin America, broadband Internet is booming. In the past year, average connection speeds have increased 40 percent in Chile, 24 percent in Brazil and 23 percent in Peru. It happens that Peru is where the Fiber To The Home Council’s annual FTTH LATAM Conference will be held this week.
Even more impressive is the increase in peak connection speeds:
- 61 percent for Chile
- 41 percent for Brazil
- 48 percent for Peru
Service providers in Latin America are helping drive fiber growth by migrating networks to new access technologies. Multiple systems operators continue to node-split and also see Radio Frequency over Glass (RFoG) and DOCSIS 3.1 as a path to increase bandwidth in the hybrid fiber coax (HFC) network. Telcos continue to deploy VDSL2 and are starting to look at G.fast / fiber-to-the-distribution-point. And of course, FTTH has clearly arrived with numerous large scale deployments across the continent.
“Smart cities” is an important topic to be discussed at FTTH LATAM Conference. It is one that brings together people, information, technology and the environment. I will explore the role of FTTH and fiber networks and its interaction with these four pillars of a smart city in a dedicated panel session – “Smart Cities: The Need for Infrastructure-Based All-Fiber Optical Networks.” This panel discussion will take place Thursday, March 10, 2016 at 10 am PET.
Regardless of whether fiber is deployed right to the home or to a node 200 meters or 1 kilometer from the home, fiber’s unlimited capacity and upgrade path is making the tremendous growth in bandwidth possible. Also during the conference, I will moderate the “CATV Dilemma: HFC or GPON” panel session on Thursday, March 10, 2016 at 4:30 pm PET.
CommScope solutions bring fiber deeper into the network and are designed to reduce total cost of ownership while accelerating time-to-market. To learn more, come visit us at booth #22 at the FTTH LATAM Conference in Lima, Peru, March 8-11, 2016.
