Israel plots gigabit fibre-to-home rollout
Seven years, 25,000 km of fibre
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The Israeli government, via state-owned electricity utility Israel Electric Corp (IEC), is taking tentative steps towards deploying a gigabit-capable fibre-to-the-home network it hopes will cover two-thirds of the country.
Having tasked IEC with managing the rollout earlier this year, the government has now announced that Viaeuropa is its favoured bidder. It says the Swedish company’s bid will be analysed over the next month in the hope of kicking off the seven-year project early in 2013.
According to Reuters, the project is running behind time as it struggled to attract participants, in spite of the “multi-billion” shekel (at current exchange rates a shekel is about a quarter of a US dollar) value of the project. In the end, the consortium likely to build the network will be half-owned by Viaeuropa, with Rapac Communications, BATM Advanced Communications, and two other companies each to hold 12.5 percent of the project.
The deployment will involve 25,000 km of fibre cable, mostly to extend BATM’s current fibre-to-the-cabinet network to homes. Most of the new deployment will be overhead to save on costs, and it’s expected to be completed by 2020.
When finished, the network will upgrade Israel’s current services – 100 Mbps down but uploads typically in the 1-1.5 Mbps range – to symmetrical gigabit capability. As IEC’s chairman, Yiftach Ron-Tal, put it, the venture will “put Israel on a par with developed countries.” ®
COMMENTS
Re: Open source
Really trying to shoehorn the open sauce in this article
2/10
troll troll harder
Well, a bit of an easier task.
After all, Israel is less than one tenth the land mass of the UK but with a higher population density, so stringing fibre the length of such a small country is hardly the same level of challenge as cabling even the UK, let alone the massively greater areas of the US or Canada. Having said that, hats off to them if they get it done as it would be a considerable technical achievement and put them well ahead of the UK. I suppose winners have high-speed fibre as well as Apache choppers and F-15s....
I can only hope
That one day the UK will catch up with those developed counties as well.
Spare a fibre guv?
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