Asteo Red Neutra: Bringing Fiber Connectivity to Rural Spain

Spain, one of the leading pioneers of fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) in Europe, has achieved a high fiber optic penetration. However, the rural areas in Spain still have inadequate broadband connectivity, which hampers their further development. "Asteo has been born specially to support this," stated Pedro Abad, founder and CEO of Asteo Red Neutra, when discussing his company's efforts in bringing connectivity to rural Spain through FTTH services in an interview. Asteo Red Neutra is a wholesale FTTH operator that is focused on building ultra-modern FTTH and backhaul networks in rural environments.

Spain leads in FTTH deployments in Europe. What factors do you think have contributed to this significant growth?

Spain was one of the first countries that started deploying FTTH in Europe with a firm commitment to develop these networks by the main telecommunication companies and the government. This has allowed Spain to be in a quite privileged place and ranked 2nd in Europe in terms of fiber optic penetration level (73.5%) according to FTTH Council, but ranking as No. 1 country in both metrics, HP (home passed) and HC (home connected), for many years. Supportive regulation for FTTH roll outs and the flexibility that the different Public Administrations are developing, is also a key factor to speed up this technology adoption.

Another key singularity of the Spanish market is the number of registered local ISPs.

In Spain there are more than 3,500 ISP licenses registered at CNMC (Spanish regulator), around 1,500 of them are already active. Most of these 1,500 are local ones, and have performed a key role in the proximity and customer centric strategy, specially in rural environments, where these companies focus their activity and business, bringing a high quality service by all means to those communities, based on their own local fiber roll outs.

Spanish people have full confidence in fiber optic and, as soon as it is available in their homes, they do not hesitate to contract it because of all the advantages over other technologies.

From your perspective, what are the major challenges for the Spanish FTTH market, and how is Asteo addressing some of those issues?

Our market is a worldwide reference in terms of effective execution of FTTH deployments, based on the reasons explained above, and as a consequence of this, the FTTH estimated coverage at national level reaches 90%. But, if we consider just rural coverage, the data decreases down to nearly 65% (FTTH Council sourcing). So, our main challenge is to connect any municipality by fiber to secure a proper connectivity that guarantees the needed foundation for the digitalization of this rural community, a strategic pillar for its future development.

Asteo has been born specially to support this, in our phase 1 we are connecting 500 municipalities with less than 1,000 inhabitants, and for connecting them we are building more than 1,900 km of backhaul (regional fiber to interconnect all these municipalities).

And to fully support this, there is also a big challenge at the Public Administration side to optimize the current administrative processes in order to speed up the civil works permits and licenses. 

At Asteo we fully believe that innovation is not just about technology, it is also about the process and way of working. We have implemented a very agile and flexible working model, where we involve any Public Administration that could affect our roll-out activities, with the aim to openly collaborate in a common goal of bringing an ultra fast broadband technology to our ultra rural municipalities areas of influence.

As a new entrant, what distinguishes you from other wholesale FTTH operators on the market?   

We are the first wholesale FTTH rural operator totally focused on bringing connectivity to ultra-rural areas with a population of less than 1,000 people. In addition to providing service to citizens and businesses in the rural areas, we have another relevant feature: our 2,000 km of fiber optic backhaul that connects each of the municipalities among them. This backhaul has enough capacity to provide services to the mobile phone antennas that are deployed in these territories and that in the future will begin to offer 5G connectivity.

As mentioned before, our vision regarding innovation also includes our business model as a neutral operator that allows any telco or digital company to offer its services in these rural locations based on Asteo's state-of-the-art network based on XGSPON technology.

In a market as dynamic as the Spanish one, what is the objective of Asteo?

We are currently deploying our network in Castilla y León, specifically in Burgos, Salamanca and Segovia, and in Extremadura, specifically in Cáceres and Badajoz. The first phase of our development plan includes bringing connectivity to nearly 500 rural municipalities and 170,000 houses. We have already completed 50% of our plan and we will keep working on connecting these rural areas. In parallel we are working to incentivise the creation of new local operators in rural areas and expanding our network of authorized operators that can use our fiber optic network.

Focusing on rural environments, what difficulties have you met during your deployments and how do you solve them?

Rural deployment is clearly conditioned by the big number of different permits to execute the roll out. We are working very closely with the Administrations to speed up this process.

Also, the execution on the ground became a challenge, in particular in some areas given the orography and physical limitations. In this case, Asteo has performed a very well adapted methodology to this civil work environment that secures we can reach any of 500 planned municipalities as part of our network topology.

In a world hungry for ever-richer digital experiences, how do you support the rising expectations of operators and their customers?

When we started project planning at Asteo, we were considering the pros and cons of the different available technologies. At the end our conclusion was to focus on bringing the latest available technology to the rural and secure a future-proof network that can accommodate the increasing demand profile from the consumers without any technical risk. According to the study conducted by the "Observatorio Asteo"  when a town is connected to fiber, their residents use it with high frequency everyday and this will keep growing, for example: 89% browse the Internet, 83% use e-mail, 79% use it for social networks/messaging, 68% for bank transactions, and 52% enjoy films, series or watch sports. To a lesser extent, but with significant percentages of use, are shopping online (50%), administrative procedures (40%) and listening to podcasts or radio (34%).

Also we have designed our network to be able to provide any connectivity based on high technical specs and capacities, like 5G services which mainly demand a very low latency metric and can only be supported by networks like Asteo's. 

What do you think of ZTE as a partner and what's your expectations for it?

Asteo's vision is to work everyday to connect the rural to the world, and our contribution to the society is to secure that digitalization will not be limited due to digital infrastructure shortage.

The role of this network is crucial for the future development of these rural regions so we request our suppliers to be very solid, consistent, efficient and future-proof validated.

Our network must be solid, resilient and capable of guaranteeing the needs of this society today and in the future, and for this, the way in which it is built and the elements that are used are key. ZTE is a company committed to support this mission of connecting the rural with its latest generation equipment, with XGSPON technology, and always willing to participate in any improvement initiative that we implement at Asteo.

What do you think the industry will look like in Spain in the coming years, and how will Asteo make a big difference in its growth?

Spain is on the right path in terms of increasing the fiber optic network. An important task ahead is to connect the rural areas to fiber and allow them to have the same services as in urban areas. But the focus cannot only be to develop the fiber networks. It is important to contribute to the adoption of the technology by the residents of small towns, the digitalisation of the companies and services available in these areas.

Also, the 5G roll out is the next European challenge. Based on the lessons learned from the deployment of FTTH, we cannot allow that, once again, a part of society is excluded from accessing the advances that this technology and its added services will bring. 

Therefore, Asteo's backhaul network will make a key contribution to ensure that the mobile antennas distributed in the rural areas we cover have adequate connectivity capable of supporting the bandwidth needs, but especially low latency needs, which are essential for guaranteeing 5G.