NAB: FTTH provider’s customers bury their own fiber

LAS VEGAS -- A Norwegian triple-play provider has a unique solution to the pesky problem of digging up consumers' yards to bury fiber-to-the-home. Lyse Tele, an overbuilder that launched its fiber-based all-IP solution in 2002, installs the fiber right to the edge of a customer's lawn, then gives the customer instructions on how to bury their own fiber cable to the house.

Lyse pre-sells all of its services, through town meetings and other gatherings held in advance of any build out, said Jarle Johnsen, head of engineering for TV & Media at Lyse told an audience at NAB's Telecom 2009 event here. The company currently has 130,000 customers, 80% of which agreed to dig their own trenches and bury their own fiber, in exchange for a discount on the installation of the service.

"It's a very churn-reducing event," Johnsen said. "People get emotionally attached to the fiber. I think the churn rate is something like 0.2% for people who install their own fiber."

A Lyse technician goes out to the home to install the residential termination device and will fix any problems that have arisen out of the customer install, Johnsen said, but Lyse has not encountered many faulty installations.

"Occasionally, people underestimate how long it will take them, and we have to encourage them to get it done," Johnsen said.

Lyse started as a local company in Stavanger, a unit of the local power company, Lyse Energi A/S, turning up its first customers in September of 2002, Johnsen said. The company was drawn into regional, then national, and now Nordic – in Denmark – deployments by demand from other energy companies, municipalities and others. Lyse is now building in 280 municipalities in Norway, and its biggest problem is keeping up with demand, Johnsen told the NAB audience.

That doesn't mean there weren't technology problems, chief of which was the immaturity of early equipment, the lack of integration of different IPTV piece parts and, ultimately, the need to develop its own middleware, working with Latens, Johnsen said. Today, Lyse sells a symmetric 10-megabit-per-second Internet access service with network storage, email, firewall and WiFi, along with a 32-channel video service including video-on-demand, games, HDTV and DVR, two phone lines with toll-free Nordic calling for 90 euros a month ($116).

"We are profitable right now," Johnsen said. "It wasn't a painless process."