In-Home Broadband Excellence Committee

Maarten Egmond, Chair of the In-Home Broadband Excellence Committee of the FTTH Council Europe, dives into one of the most crucial yet often overlooked aspects of fiber deployment: the quality of the broadband experience inside the home. In this episode, Maarten discusses why in-home broadband excellence has become strategically essential for Communication Service Providers (CSPs) and how it ties directly into broader fiber deployment goals across the European Union.
In this episode, our guest will answer to these questions and much more:

Why is in-home broadband excellence strategically relevant for CSPs, and how does it relate to fibre network deployment strategies in the European Union?
From the experience of your committee, what are the best practices to provide, manage and monitor the ‘Quality of Experience’ for end-users?
What are the key factors driving fibre adoption among consumers?
What new technologies or innovations is the committee exploring to enhance in-home broadband experiences?

Read the full interview below to get the answers to these questions.

Why is in-home broadband excellence strategically relevant for CSPs, and how does it relate to fibre network deployment strategies in the European Union?

As we saw at the FTTH Conference in March, fibre rollout is steadily continuing, but will need additional investment to close the remaining gap. This investment ultimately has to come from paying subscribers, but the adoption remains lagging. If the in-home broadband experience is not addressed well, subscribers will not be able to benefit from the inherent quality of the fibre connection, and they will not see the need to adopt it.
The fact that so many homes connected stay ‘unadopted’ is a serious threat to the future of a digital Europe where everyone should have access to Gigabit connectivity (and beyond). And delivering ‘In-Home Broadband Excellence’ is the answer to that threat.

In the picture on the left, action from the Panel 10 - FTTH and the future of wireless applications (Wi-Fi 8 and 6G) at the FTTH Conference 2025, in Amsterdam.

From the experience of your committee, what are the best practices to provide, manage and monitor the ‘Quality of Experience’ for end-users?

This is a tough question to answer. There are so many things to address, from the basic infrastructure in the home, to ensuring the CSP can manage that infrastructure to help the end-users where needed, to technologies to deploy new services for additional revenue, and indeed to unlock real subscriber value that can only be delivered over fibre efficiently. For this reason, we have just released the third edition of the IBE Guide, which addresses all these topics and more. For the first time, this edition also brings content for the technicians that do the in-home installation. Many service providers choose to send a technician, to have a human touch-point with the subscriber. However, ensuring the technicians are equipped to do a high quality installation requires additional knowledge and training compared to what is typically done today.

Perhaps my conclusion on the overall best practices is especially: adopt standards and technologies that already exist. We have a habit to quickly skip over to the next ‘silver bullet’ (for example the generative-AI hype currently ongoing), but we forget there are many things that we can do with available down-to-earth technology that are not yet even implemented in many networks to the fullest.

What are the key factors driving fibre adoption among consumers?

European consumers are typically very price conscious, and this can be an issue as fibre is not usually a cheaper subscription. But in my opinion Europeans aren’t adverse to paying for value. In the beginning, fibre deployments could be marketed locally in effective ways. But in the mass-market, if consumers don’t perceive they get more value out of the fibre connection than what they already have, they will be reluctant to switch, especially since fibre is unlikely to be a cheaper subscription for them.

Well implemented fibre networks are of high quality, and subscribers will know. As we still await growth of new consumer services that truly and honestly require fibre connectivity, quality of the network remains the key driving factor. And this can be best influenced by taking care during deployment and initial installation. This is exactly why the committee is now focused on providing more value to CSPs in that process.

In the picture on the left, action from the Panel 10 - FTTH and the future of wireless applications (Wi-Fi 8 and 6G) at the FTTH Conference 2025, in Amsterdam.

What new technologies or innovations is the committee exploring to enhance in-home broadband experiences?

We’ve just seen Wi-Fi 7 released, as a major upgrade to the quality of the in-home broadband experience. Of course it will take many years to fully mature and ‘trickle down’ into most end-user devices so it is something to continue monitoring and expanding on. On a related note, while mesh networking is not exactly ‘new’ anymore, it remains of interest to deploy it more effectively, perhaps coupled with other improvements to the (initial) in-home installation quality. The latter isn’t exactly a new technology or innovation in most senses of the word, but as I mentioned above, it could actually be one of the best ways to enhance the in-home broadband experience over the next few years. Hopefully Wi-Fi usage in the 6GHz band will be expanded in Europe as well, so that in a few years, we could finally say we have achieved the solution to In-home Broadband Excellence, once and for all. Of course we all know it’s not quite going to be like that, but we have something to aspire to, and we can certainly get a lot closer than where we are today!

In the picture on the right, Maarten Egmond is moderating the Panel 10 - FTTH and the future of wireless applications (Wi-Fi 8 and 6G) at the FTTH Conference 2025, in Amsterdam.

More about Maarten Egmond

Maarten Egmond finished university with a double BSc in IT as well as applied physics and started his career in R&D of optical components, followed by embedded software development work for high-end X-ray machines. After this, he moved into the FTTH industry where he has been contributing to technology and product development for more than 15 years, currently serving as CTO of Genexis, and since 2021 as Committee Chair of In-Home Broadband Excellence for the FTTH Council Europe.

Unlocking a greener Europe with energy-efficiency labelling of broadband equipment

Nov 29, 2022

Company type: | Vendor/Reseller (Products) |

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Member company: S&T Isktratel
Country or geographical scope: Global
Period: 2022 and beyond
Company type: Vendor/Reseller
Product/service category involved: All broadband equipment

Abstract

To make environmentally responsible decisions, network operators need credible figures about power consumption of the broadband equipment they procure and use.

The introduction of energy-efficiency labels allows them to make well informed decisions and reduce their carbon footprint. The labels state a product's power consumption and the level of compliance with the Code of Conduct on Energy Consumption of Broadband Equipment as a framework for providing credible and comparable data.

S&T Iskratel believes that the whole broadband industry needs to join the initiative, help operators effectively reduce the environmental impact, and take a positive step towards a greener Europe.

Context

With the explosion of data traffic and the energy consumption of data transmissions increasing, undertaking steps to reduce the carbon footprint is the responsibility of the entire telecoms industry. In their effort to reach net zero emission targets, operators' attention has rightly shifted to utilising solutions that are more energy efficient: switching from copper to fibre [1][2], and selecting PON over P2P [3][4].

To make environmentally responsible decisions, operators need credible and comparable figures about power consumption of the broadband equipment they procure and use. At present, however, they have no tools to compare the products – they can receive data from equipment vendors, but there is nothing to help them compare the power-consumption figures. Even worse, they get exposed to misleading information and greenwashing.

Greater levels of transparency are needed.

The task for the entire telecommunications industry – and equipment vendors in particular – is to provide credible and comparable data about power consumption, and facilitate well-informed decisions that will help operators reduce their carbon footprint and environmental impact.

Solutions

The broadband industry already has the framework for credible and comparable power consumption figures in place: The Code of Conduct on Energy Consumption of Broadband Equipment [5] published by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre.

Specifically, the Code of Conduct (CoC) sets the limits of power consumption of broadband equipment, and specifies the test methodology. All (voluntary) signatories commit themselves to achieving the power consumption targets, and to publicly disclosing power consumption of their broadband equipment.

After having signed the Code of Conduct in early 2022, S&T Iskratel has fully committed itself to ensuring that its broadband-access equipment complies with the limits on power consumption imposed by the code, and to providing full disclosure and transparency to customers, users and general public.

For the operators, credible power-consumption figures are the first piece in the puzzle. S&T Iskratel has decided to make a step forward and provide also the “missing piece of the jigsaw” to unlocking a greener Europe and reducing operators’ carbon footprints, and introduce energy-efficiency labels.

In addition to power consumption (which is measured following test methods in the CoC), the labels state the product's level of CoC compliance, provided as a percentage of the limit set by the CoC. Similar in design to those used for energy classes of domestic appliances, the labels are easy to read and understand for operators and end-users alike.

The two labels below provide examples for labels of a compact OLT and of a home gateway.

S&T Iskratel is committed to label all its new broadband equipment; specifically, Iskratel Lumia optical line terminals and Iskratel Innbox customer-premises equipment. The labelling improves credibility and comparability, and allows operators to make well informed decisions when selecting products to put into their network.

S&T Iskratel believes that undertaking the steps to reduce the global warming is the responsibility of the entire telecommunications industry, and that everyone in the value chain – vendors, operators, end users, regulators and authorities – must participate in reducing the carbon footprint of their activities.

S&T Iskratel repeatedly calls on the whole industry to join the initiative and take a positive step towards a greener Europe with industry-wide adoption of energy-efficiency labelling. This will help operators and end users correctly estimate the contribution of electricity generation to their overall carbon footprint, and effectively reduce their negative impact on the environment.

Results

Since spring 2022 when the initiative was first presented, S&T Iskratel received impressively positive feedback from European operators. Their interest has proven that they understand their responsibility in contributing to limiting the global warming, and that they understand the role of their equipment vendors in the supply chain.

Besides lower carbon footprint as a result of deploying lower-consumption equipment, operators benefit from lower electricity costs. As a standout example, an established and rapidly growing full-fibre operator has realised that the investment in switching to S&T Iskratel's OLTs with record-low power consumption returns in 3-5 years, solely thanks to the energy savings. The operator's investment decision was based (also) on credibility of figures on the product's energy-efficiency label.

Conclusions

While operators understand that switching from copper to fibre (and to PON in particular) can reduce their energy consumption and the related carbon footprint by orders of magnitude, they still lack the tools to compare various vendors' products. Widespread, industry-wide adoption of energy-efficiency labelling will address the need, allowing operators to follow their sustainability strategy, avoid the traps of greenwashing and base decisions exclusively on credible and comparable data.

Contact

Tomo Bogataj, Head of Broadband Marketing, S&T Iskratel
t.bogataj@snt-iskratel.si

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