To date, Telefónica has closed over a thousand copper plants, thanks to the implementation of FTTH fibre, which represents a major advance in digitalisation in Spain as well as compliance with the company’s strategic environmental commitment to reaching zero net emissions by 2025.
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The closure of a copper station entails an energy saving of more than 1000 GWh, i.e. some 355,000 tonnes of CO2, the equivalent to planting six million trees. In addition, a fibre switchboard provides service to the same number of accesses as those provided from four copper plants, and fibre access technology only occupies 15% of the space occupied by copper access.
Telefónica initiated this plant closure plan in 2016, with the aim of decommissioning all copper plants by 2025, year when the 3G shutdown will also be completed. Since 2016, the company has achieved its goals non stop despite the circumstances that took place in recent months due to the pandemic, which has had consequences in all areas of life.
The success of this transformation has also meant that Spain has set an example in Europe in terms of fibre optic deployment throughout its territory.
The dismantling of Telefónica’s first thousand copper plants involves dismantling some 65,000 tonnes of cable and recycling 7,140 tonnes of waste electrical and electronic equipment, known as WEEE. In addition, more than 128,000 cards have been reused in its network and, as mentioned above, around 1,000 GWh have been saved.
According to the FTTH Council Europe report (data from September 2020) Spain ranks third in Europe in fully fibre networks, only behind Iceland and Belarus, although with the important difference that these countries are very different in size to Spain.
Although these countries have an 8% higher penetration of fibre in homes, exceeding 70%, we are talking about a country with some 47 million inhabitants and 506,000 km2, compared to Iceland, with only 360,000 inhabitants and an area of 103,000 km2, or Belarus, with an area of 207,600 km2 for 9.5 million inhabitants.
When compared to countries with figures more similar to Spai , France is in twelfth place, with less than 30% FTTH.
The installation of the DAS (Distributed Acoustic Sensing) interrogator device will transform one of the observatory’s eight kilometre long fibre optic cables into a seismic network of thousands of ground motion sensors , which will fine tune the monitoring of the seismic activity generated by the La Palma volcano eruption. ■