Fiber to the curb. Optical fiber is just as cheap as copper..........
Cheap Optical Superhighway
Will Reach Japanese Homes
In the year 2001 fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) will bring practical optical fiber communications to the home.
NTT Corp of Japan expects to begin installing fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) in 2001 or 2002 (Fig 1). In preparation, the firm began laying optical fiber to roadway curbs (or utility poles) in three major Japanese cities in March 1998. It plans to use existing copper to connect to the home using the fiber-to-the-curb (FTTC) scheme (called the system in Japan). Home communications demand, especially for Internet access, continues to climb rapidly, and NTT plans to answer calls for higher speed and lower cost with FTTH.
FTTH will also mean major market growth for domestic communication equipment manufacturers. An engineer at a firm manufacturing components for communications goes so far as to say, "My firm is betting its existence on FTTH," pointing to the fact that capital, people and tools are already being invested.
By about 2001, when the introduction of FTTH is expected to take off, test broadcasts of terrestrial digital television programs will also be under way, and high-speed datacomm services using the cable television (TV) network will be operating full-blast. A succession of new data highways to the home have been announced, such as asynchronous digital subscriber line (ADSL), wireless local loop (WLL) and digital satellite data broadcasting. But FTTH offers the potential for the fastest and cheapest service of them all.
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