Thanks to Costas Troulos - one of my fellow members of the "Fibre Ring" - he has translated an extract for us of the recently announced broadband strategy for Greece.

On September 3rd, Greek Minister of Communications, Mr. Chatzidakis announced the long awaited national strategy for the national broadband network. Following the examples of Korea, Japan and Sweden, Greece drafted a national strategy for fiber access based on governmental funding and coordination to build a nationwide fiber infrastructure to ensure fiber access to approximately 2M households or about 40% coverage of the country.

The project's main attributes as announced at this stage are:

• Creation of an Open Access network for telecommunications and digital service providers


• User connections will be at least 100Mbps


• The network will provide Dark Fiber services based on the passive infrastructure model


• Management will be granted to private partners on a PPP basis for 30 years


• Project's time of completion: 7 years


• Project wil include Athens, Thessaloniki and the 50 biggest cities of the country


• To speed up the execution, the project will be separated in 3, each part covering a distinct geographical area of the country by a different PPP


• Government will provide funding and subsidies, update the legislation and regulation framework and define technical specifications.
  

The Greek government has thoroughly thought threw this strategy, including aspects for a definition for "open access", the technology used, the definition of speeds which compete with other major broadband countries, and clear funding guidelines. I think our government should be have a hard look at their approach, because at the moment our NBN is going to be an embarrassment when compared to what other countries are doing.

Costas has published a loosely translated version of the press release.