compaq.com
is a very useful service
The World Wide Wheee!
"Fiber to the curb" is the current Holy Grail when it comes to all-you-can-eat bandwidth for offices and homes; if
you replace the phone companies' sometimes hundred-year-old copper wires with glass strands that can carry gigabytes per second, then the World Wide Wait becomes the World Wide Wheee!
(OK, there are always other bottlenecks, but a fiber link for the "last mile" would make a huge difference.)
Indeed, according to a Strategis Group report, 23 million U.S. households are interested in high-speed access (http://www.strategisgroup.com/press/pubs/hs_internet.html); they liken this growing demand to "water behind a dam."
The problem is, the entrenched phone and cable companies are (somewhat understandably) not rushing out to dig up all of our streets and bury end-user fiber in place of their $100 billion worth of copper, except in some very high-density city areas. So they and competitors are (slowly) pursuing ways to leverage the three copper networks that already hit most buildings: phone wires, cable TV, and the power grid (see a table in the March/April Technology Review magazine for a comparison of the options -
techreview.com. And, we're also getting close to pressing satellites
into service, which we'll discuss later in this issue. But the allure of the FAR faster "fiber to the curb" is strong
enough that some people won't wait.
Internet Fiber, Inc. (http://www.interfiber.com/top.htm) is developing "last mile" fiber networks for new neighborhoods, which are installed as the area is built. It's paid for, and owned, not by a monopoly business, but by the homeowners themselves. Essentially, this company installs at least two fibers from a neighborhood network access point to each home or office, and works with the builders to provide Ethernet wiring throughout each home or office. The resulting neighborhood network, essentially paid for through each mortgage, is owned by a neighborhood association which has the ability to purchase bulk Internet service from Internet Fiber, or from other suppliers in the future.
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