Oi Is Making FTTR the Future for Brazil
--Oi, one of the largest home broadband service providers in Brazil, has released an all-new Oi Fibra X all-optical strategy in Latin America to meet rising requirements and improve digital home service experience. By bringing Huawei’s fiber to the room (FTTR) networking service into the mix, Oi is making whole-house gigabit networks ready for every home and SME, lighting up our digital lives and smart office experiences.
Over the past few years, it has been no surprise that more and more people are moving online for work and for fun, and Brazil has been no exception. Internet and smart home applications have taken off in our home country during this time. However, the networks that serve Brazil's 214 million residents have struggled to keep up with the technical requirements these new applications have, particularly in terms of bandwidth and latency. This trend is especially true in the field of home Wi-Fi.
Bringing fiber to the room and quality to the customer
Currently, only 50% of Brazil’s broadband users have access to 200-400 Mbps connections, and only 10% have 500-900 Mbps connections. At Oi, we plan our business around how best to meet customer requirements. And so, we created our Fibra X strategy to bring premium fiber connections, reliable service delivery, and digital transformation support to customers.
The Oi Fibra X strategy is based on FTTR services that extend optical fiber to rooms instead of just to the edge of your home or campus. This improves user experience in multiple ways, from providing faster rates and expanding coverage, to improving roaming and concurrency.
The strengths, and opportunities, of FTTR
Fiber technology, and FTTR in particular, has developed rapidly in recent years, specifically because of these new digital home requirements. 451 carriers around the world already offer gigabit broadband practices to an estimated 120 million users, but lagging Wi-Fi capabilities prevent these users from enjoying the full experience of this bandwidth. 60% of broadband complaints are currently linked to Wi-Fi, and 55% of households report poor WiFi performance.
By enabling over 1000 Mbps Wi-Fi to every room in a house, FTTR is able to support a wide array of increasingly mainstream applications, like online education, remote work, immersive extended reality (XR), and whole-house intelligence. FTTR solutions extend fiber to all terminals in a home, helping carriers smoothly transition from fiber to the home (FTTH) to FTTR, increasing both user stickiness and average revenue per user (ARPU). This has made it exceedingly attractive to carriers.
Choosing the right partner at the right time
There are currently more than 100 carriers around the world who have put FTTR into commercial use, and most of them are provincial carriers in China. And so, when Oi began our own FTTR journey, we decided to turn to a clear leader in this field: Huawei.
Huawei’s FTTR solution helps carriers build gigabit Wi-Fi home networks that offer 100% home coverage, 2 Gpbs uplink and downlink rates, and a roaming handover time of less than 20 ms. It also enables simultaneous intelligent connection of up to 128 devices.
Oi has since worked with Huawei to develop new innovative technologies and push FTTR research forward. Together, we have worked on a number of projects to provide premium FTTR networks for our customers and overcome the indoor Wi-Fi challenges that are holding the industry back. We are building FTTR joint showcases, benchmarking customer service centers, and carrying out joint marketing activities to this end.
With their FTTR solution and other enablement tools like the NCE digital operations platform, we aim to convert 10,000 high-value FTTR users this year.
Where will we go next?
While we are exceedingly proud of these achievements, we are also already making moves to build on this momentum.
First, we need to continue marketing and publicizing these new services to improve the perceptions of potential users and develop our user base through multiple channels. A new experience center is already in the works to help with this.
Second, we will continue to deepen our connections with Huawei and enhance our planning, construction, acceptance, and maintenance capabilities to provide users with premium end-to-end experiences. Huawei’s technologies have already proven extremely useful by intelligently improving Wi-Fi visibility and management, and enabling us to identify problems and optimize performance remotely, without home visits.
Third, we need to build a channel ecosystem and work with partners to accelerate large-scale commercial use of FTTR. This technology is ideal for all carriers seeking to enter the smart home field. By working together, we can explore a host of new smart home services. We already have our eye on some services such as smart home security, smart home storage, and service acceleration.
By focusing on innovation, cooperation, and win-win solutions, we can all succeed. I for one am excited to see just how much our industry changes as carriers grow in the digital home service market and shift from bandwidth monetization to experience monetization.
