J’son & Partners Consulting together with General Informational Partner – Compulink Company – presents brief results of the research: The Construction of Fiber-Optic Line (FOL) Market in Russian Federation.
OL construction market in Russia is experiencing changes nowadays, due to the high demand on fixed and mobile broadband access (BBA) services. Key demand drivers for these services are:
- Increasing number of multimedia BBA-devices among end customers;
- Expansive range of new services based on high-speed data transfer with consumption of large data, such as IPTV, online-TV, navigation and map online services, and other “heavy content” services.
Main trunk FOL directions had been constructed by now and at present all focus is made on WAN construction in the Russian regions. The explosive growth of traffic forced companies to modernize the transmitting capacities of currently operating trunk networks till terabyte level.
According to J’son & Partners Consulting, in Russia the length of fiber-optic communication lines increased for 61.6 thousand km (excluding mobile backhaul).
Lack of market growth in 2012 is explained by range of problems connected to market leader’s activities of InfraEngineering Company, which constructed networks for Rostelecom company and took over 1/3 of the market in 2011. Changes in assets and main contractor for FOL construction influenced the total market tendencies.
According to J’son & Partners Consulting’s estimations, in 2013 half of all constructed optical networks are located in North-West, Central and Volga federal regions. In 2011 share of these regions in the total number of constructed FOL was 55%. Share of these regions is decreasing and operators’ focus is aimed at Ural federal region (UFR). The active construction of FOL in 2013 was observed in Siberia (SiFR) – 15% of all constructed FOL. 
Intracity networks secured the key growth rate of FOL length in 2013. This increase is being explained by the development of high-traffic generated BBA services in medium-size and small Russian cities. Nevertheless, according to J’son & Partners Consulting’s experts, the construction of intrazone FOLs will prevail in the short-term perspective – in order to connect new cities to trunk operators’ networks. The “milestone” period will more likely be in 2016, when major part of constructed FOLs will be the intrazone networks.
According to J’son & Partners Consulting, over 100 companies operate on the FOL construction market today, 20 largest of them have around 80% market share.
By J’son & Partners Consulting’s experts opinion, the following tendency can be viewed lately on the FOL construction market – increasing business activity of small construction companies. They more and more often compete with large market players, but in general still do not play major roles on the market, and work as sub-contractors. Key customers on FOL construction in small and average cities are large communication operators, which fulfill projects together with large construction companies.
FOL Construction Market in Russia is stable and attractive one. It provides its participants opportunities for further development for new construction and for network modernization by capacity inceasing of currently working FOLs.
