Hello Jack,
"would you say that the last mile solution will be a fibre optic cable into each home - whether through utilities such as Sierra Pacific, or fibre optic line pulls, or wound around coax, as Time Warner tried a few years ago. That when that is fully realized, other fixed point solutions will be obviated because less dependable."
I think that we will begin seeing pilots, and even some early deployments, of fiber into the home this year which will be far more significant than the earlier DSL pilots of three to five years ago. Likewise, they will be more deliberate than the early HFC trials, since the demand now exists far more prevalently than it did back then.
BLS already has some homes wired with fiber using PONs, and this latest initiative by the utilities doesn't sound like they're very bashful about going into this new pursuit along with HWP and ORCL. But I'll wait to hear more of what they've got to say before commenting further on them in specific terms.
But fiber into every home? Not for a while, if ever, because it's not the best solution for "every" home. Not immediately, nor as an appreciable share of the market, in any event. At least not directly.
What I think we're going to see, however, which was not anticipated to take place for another four or five years (and some have said much longer), is a more serious focus on making FTTH a reality through the use of "passives," a lot sooner than was previously thought.
I think that the anticipated lag time, i.e., the previously anticipated time lapse between the end of 3G wireless deployments and the commencement of FTTHs may have narrowed very significantly during the past couple of months due to mounting pressures and blossoming opportunities which didn't exist before "for sure."
These new pressures and opportunities have been spawned in part by
(1) the OA initiatives by the ISPs;
(2) the recent merger of TWX and AOL;
(3) the mounting bandwidth demands of a maturing Internet model; and,
(4) recent successful field trials of passive optical components and network elements, which have demonstrated satisfactory results, both in technological and economic terms.
Whereas, it may have originally been thought that the next generation wireless deployments might have been half-way completed by 2002, and FTTH might not have begun until 2004 or 2005 at the earliest, the actual gap may be one of only a year or two now, rather than 2 to 4 years, and they may be even overlapping in some instances, in those locales which are slated for early deployments of FTTH.
I'm sure I'll get some rebuttal on this from established industry players, and investors of same, and they would be correct were I speaking exclusively of their builds. But we should all be aware now that there are other players who are perched to begin encroaching in this area who will bear out my predictions, whether the incumbents move more slowly or quickly as a result of their presence, or not.
[[Speaking of rebuttals, last week sometime I received a private message from a member of another forum who very politely suggested to me that I might be, perhaps, delusional --as in, an abnormal mental state characterized by the occurrence of psychotic episodes-- and maybe extending my enthusiasm about fiber into my writings a bit too precariously. This was in response to my suggesting that utilities, along with other contractors and last mile purveyors would eventually get involved with other industry players, deploying residential Internet access platforms of the type mentioned in the InfoWorld article, upstream.]]
On the other side of this coin, fiber will most certainly NOT be the best solution for all homes in all situations. That fact, I think, speaks for itself.
But for the vast majority of homes that are being serviced today by established HFC builds and even ILEC deep fiber supported digital loop carrier systems, I feel confident in saying that the majority of those homes will at some point in the future be migrated to fiber, either to the curb, or directly into the home.
If they are not supported by the incumbents directly, then someone else will do it for them.
Another variant of deep fiber penetration which I think also stands a chance at share is one which we've discussed here in the past that we've called HFW, or hybrid fiber-wireless. In this instance, fiber is extended to a neighborhood wireless base station capable of broadband delivery to surrounding homes.
I've not yet seen an architecture exactly defined that will support this in quite the same way that I've been envisaging it, but it's out there somewhere. Either I've simply not come across it yet, or its out there waiting to be born, I'm sure. If you or anyone knows of a vendor's approach to satisfying this scenario, please post.
In any of the future architectures which are used, I feel highly confident that fiber will at least, in one way or another, play a key role in delivering broadband Internet services.
In a strange twist, perhaps the residents who will be excluded from these possibilities the most, over the short and intermediate terms, are those who live in urban settings, oddly enough, whose homes are right on top of (within stone throwing distances of) central offices.
Those residents do not live far enough away from those central office hubs in order to economically justify the pulling of fiber. At some point poetic justice may be seen close at hand for those who've had to beg for their bits in the past. And so it goes.
Regards, Frank Coluccio |
