Broadband Days 2018

Philippe Vanhille, Chairman of the Europacable Digital Team and SVP Telecom Business at Prysmian Group spoke at this year’s edition of the Broadband Days Conference which took place on November 19-20 in Brussels, under the title “Mind the Broadband Gap”.

The event presented the winners of the Broadband Awards for 2018 and provided an opportunity to discuss progress made in terms of regulation, financing and deployment of broadband networks. The main subject of the debate have been the recent proposals for the post-2020 Multi-annual Financial Framework, in particular the Digital part of the new Connecting Europe Facility (CEF). Other discussion topics include the new Code for European electronic communications, the launch of the Connecting Europe Broadband Fund (CEBF), the WiFi4EU initiative, and the other tools developed in order to reach the Gigabit Society strategic objectives by 2025.

In his intervention Mr. Vanhille highlighted that, as globally leading cable players, we are aware of the gap of broadband roll out in Europe compared to the rest of the world, as well as between European member states, in particular between urban and rural roll out, and ultimately between high and low quality infrastructures.

Discussions mostly focused on how to build the right digital infrastructures in Europe in order to enable 5G coverage, therefore in his closing remarks Mr. Vanhille summarized the position of our industry as follows: "There will be no 5G without deep fibre networks. Let´s build this right – not quick & dirty, but let´s build it to the highest quality standards so that it lasts”.