While many large EU Telco providers are still claiming important investments on incremental upgrades such as VDSL2 deployed from street cabinets (FTTN), important questions remain about whether favouring this technology over the more expensive fibre to the home (FTTH) is worth the loss that could be incurred in operational efficiency and in global competitiveness.

The costs of high-speed broadband connections are substantial and therefore clearly require attention. On the other hand, let us not forget about the revenue side of high-speed connections. Traditional thinking is that the network operators installing the connections should also be able to recover their costs by selling their services to consumers. In practice, this leads to operator revenues dominated by triple play services (TV, fast Internet and good old telephony). But high-speed broadband has much more value to offer to society than just triple play! Think of all the useful and necessary applications in health, education, security, etc. Other sectors can provide additional revenue and even share some of the costs of broadband.

In many broadband discussions it seems like it is taken for granted, that there is an enormous and unquestionable need for hi speed broadband "everywhere" and for "everyone" - and that the key goal therefore is to roll out hi speed/fibre based broadband as fast as possible. This view is heavily supported by the operators, and their "friends".

There is good evidence that internet exchanges are beneficial to the cities that attract them. With all the debate about internet speed, many businesses will become more effective simply by clustering in business exchange areas which co-locate computing power and high-speed internet access.

This is a major part of the design for the Internet age - yet we seem to have lost it in all the debate about broadband speeds.