FUDdy duddy

Dutch daily Trouw has an expose (Babelfish English translation) today of efforts by Dutch cable association Vecai to petition the Dutch housing minister to bar five housing corporations from taking a 33% stake in the Amsterdam FTTH project. While the article highlights that Vecai and UPC believe that fiber investment is unnecessary as the coax network is wholly adequate for the foreseeable future, the author also points out something I wrote about in November, that UPC's French subsidiary Noos is trialling FTTH in the Paris area.

Looking a bit deeper into the background uncovers that 38 communities (c. 600k households) surrounding Paris laid 360km of dark fiber under the auspices of SIPPEREC, literally the Intercommunal Syndicate of the Periphery of Paris for Electricity and Communications Networks. Some of this fiber was subsequently leased to Suez unit Lyonnaise Communications, which, of course traded under the name of Noos and was subsequently sold to UPC in 2004. Call me churlish, but it looks as though UPC, fighting municipal fiber in the Netherlands, is only too happy to exploit it in France.