Joost Farwerck presented KPN’s fixed network strategy at the Dutch operator’s investor day. The aim is to increase the company’s share of the broadband market to at least 45 percent, from 41 percent now, and increase the number of revenue-generating units from 1.8 to 2.4 per household by 2015.
The VDSL network will be expanded and upgraded. Pair bonding is possible for 60-90 percent of households with a double copper pair; this will double the available speeds. The operator already conducted a successful test, which resulted in speeds of 20 to 100Mbps. A commercial launch is planned for the fourth quarter. After that, vectoring is planned for the second half of 2012, as well as phantoming in 2013, in order to further boost speeds. KPN is working with Alcatel-Lucent and ZTE on the network upgrades. FTTH will be rolled out in attractive areas, with KPN acknowledging that over the long term this is a superior technology. By 2013, its fibre venture Reggefiber is expected to have 21 percent coverage. The network technologies planned include:: o ADSL: 8-20 Mbps, average 12. o VDSL: 9-50 Mbps, average 20. o VDSL with bonding: 18-100 Mbps, average 40. o VDSL with bonding and vectoring: 18-190 Mbps, average 50. o VDSL with bonding, vectoring and phantoming: 30-300 Mbps, average 150. o FTTH: minimum 1 Gbps.
All together this should lead to 21 percent of customers with over 1Gbps in 2013, 55 percent with at least 40Mbps and 11 percent with at least 20Mbps. By the end of 2011, 40 percent of homes should have at least 40Mbps, rising to 70 percent by the end of 2012.
Marketing will take a regional approach, and IPTV and FTTH will be offered by all the KPN brands. TV has become an important element is selling triple-play plans, and KPN plans to improve its TV portfolio with beter image quality, quicker channel changing and a new interface. Multi-screen services are also planned, to bring the service to devices such as the iPad and smartphones. Over the fibre network, KPN will introduce speeds of 500Mbps to 1Gbps, and customers in FTTH areas will be migrated to fibre. The current ARPU for fibre is EUR 60. XS4All recently launched on FTTH, and it will be followed by Telfort.
Given that KPN is the only operator with both a fixed and mobile network, it will also target fixed/mobile convergence, including using Wi-Fi offload.