Slovenian FTTH deployments before and after the economic crisis

Abstract

The Slovenian fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) market is an interesting case, since Slovenia has a high level of FTTH deployment, intense infrastructure competition in urban areas and regulated access to FTTH networks. In this paper, the FTTH access solutions that are implemented in the Slovenian telecommunications market are reviewed. Before the economic crisis, in 2009, the two main Slovenian telecommunications operators started to deploy FTTH networks in a point-to-point (P2P) architecture and connected nearly 50,000 subscribers. After 2009, a growth in the number of connected households was observed due to regulation of the optical access network, the take-up of the home passed built infrastructure before 2009, cable-television operator investments in cities and public-private partnership investments in rural areas. Those investors that appeared after 2009 have also begun to deploy a point-to-multipoint (P2MP) FTTH architecture, intended for users with lower requirements.