Kabel Noord brings FttH to Frisian households

Dokkum. The use of glassfibre connections is increasing in The Netherlands. At a high rate, health and educational institutions, governmental bodies and commercial areas are being provided with high capacity fibre infrastructures. The development of FttH for private consumers takes a bit more time.

Kabel Noord is the first cable company in the Northern part of the country that will deploy Fibre to the Home. This is a first for the province of Friesland and perhaps for the North as a whole.

In the recently developed housing project Trije Terpen, all households will be connected to the fibre network during the next few weeks. This will be done as an addition to the traditional coaxial infrastructure.

"We want to gain experience in the Trije Terpen and we will test the customer reaction to a high speed network", says CEO Niek Geelhoed. "The permanent pavement will be laid in the near future. Now is the perfect time to provide the whole neighbourhood with glass fibre. The cost can be kept in hand, now the streets are still open. The ducts from the curb to the homes are already there, so there's no need to dig into the front gardens."

Kabel Noord will not provide new services immediately; this will have to wait until the autumn. But by then, users will be able to subscribe to super fast internet. Download and upload rates will be symmetrical.

Also, new ways to experience television will be developed. The subscriber will be able to decide at what time he'll watche a television program and he will order movies and local content from the easy chair in his living room.

Kabel Noord expects that the capacity demand of its subscribers will increase considerably in the coming 5 to 10 years. Improved ways of data infrastructure will be necessary. Connection of every houshold to glass fibre seems to be the most durable solution.

From this year on, Kabel Noord will bring Fibre to the Home to every new housing development project. For the time being, coax cable will be laid alongside the fibre, but after a few years this policy will be abandoned. In major renovation projects, like the neighbourhood Fonteinslanden in Dokkum, all homes will be provided with fibre too. The private customers will not be charged with extra installation fees.

“The fibre network will be open to services by other providers", adds CEO Geelhoed.
"In this way, we will comply to the wish of the European and national governments to build open networks, where users can subscribe to products of their own choice. We already have gained a lot of experience with opening our network to third parties. Our present coaxial cable network has been open to a number of internet providers for years now, so this is not new to us.
"The new technologies might enable local municipalities, banks or housing corporation to access their clients directly."

The fibre network will bring interactive broadband services to households in the region.

Dutch version of this press release