End of the line for LLU as Europe's incumbents plot network shutdowns

摘要

More incumbents are looking to close their local exchanges, leaving Europe's regulators with the dual challenges of maintaining competition and protecting the investments of local-loop unbundlers. Incumbents building fibre-to-the-x (FTTx) networks often justify their investments by citing the income they can draw by selling their local exchanges, which are made superfluous by a fibre rollout. The question for most is not if they will close their exchanges, but when and under what conditions, as incumbents do not want to maintain legacy infrastructure and can profit from its sale. But their plans will come under fire from alternative operators, whose unbundled DSL networks would be made redundant by closures, and regulators, who are keen to maintain competition.