Hi ftth, the person,
You stated: “Loop lengths in the US are much longer than most of the rest of the world, and the way the copper is physically routed, and small bundles near the homes are combined into medium bundles a few thousand feet back, then into large bundles several thousand additional feet back, makes it impractical to insert active equipments anywhere but many, many thousands of feet away from the homes (unless both new copper and new fiber, as well as new electrical power is installed, which isn't likely).”
Those points elicit the following question from me: How is it, and/or why is it, that the cablecos have been able to do deep fiber penetration from their head ends into neighborhoods with active devices, both opto-electronic and RF analog (in the way of amplifiers, frequency translators, dense wavelength division multiplexing, optical amplification, and so on), and the telcos find it such a challenge?
Obviously, if it were merely as simple as stating that in the case of the cablecos there was nothing there in the first place, and it was all a first time build, it would be a no brainer. But that would not be an accurate assessment in the majority of cases because even the cablecos had multi-thousand home block feeder networks in place with horrendous numbers of unidirectional RF amplifiers to feed, and they were those networks that they eventually upgraded or overbuilt at the cost of many billions of dollars into hybrid fiber/coax networks that now support the delivery of digital payloads (while kicking the telcos butts, I should add).
So, why the disparity between the two w.r.t their zeal or lack thereof to best the other, with the cable cos clearly demonstrating that they were the more agressive of the two, at least up until now?
As for the ascending levels of copper bundling the closer one comes to approaching the central office, as you’ve described, I don’t think that we’ll be seeing the same kinds of (nor the same numbers of) deep fiber concentrators that were thought to be imminent just a couple of years ago. That is, not if the telcos are truly serious about implementing Fiber To The Premises (FTTP) access platforms, as they have now publicly claimed that they would.
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What gets me about these discussions that we have here on this board is that we continue to lay down arguments as though the cablecos and telcos were the only games in town. Maybe that’s been historically true, where the status quo is concerned, but is that what we should be contemplating on a board that seeks answers about future broadband challenges?
Over on the Cook Wireless Symposium list earlier today Jorge Ortiz posted a message that was particularly salient in this regard. I’ll re-post it in its entirety below, since I think it’s germane to what I've just stated above. He cited a recent O'Reilly interview that was given to IDG News (see url below). In particular, see what O'Reilly had to say about Ray Kurzweil's approach to setting horizons and goals in connection with the innovative work that he performed. How does Kurzweill's view of product development and trajectory setting fit into our current discussion having to do with what the ILECs, or anyone else for that matter, should be doing to enhance the cause of *true* broadband delivery to end users, as time goes by?
-------J.O. wrote:
Source: idg.se
Tim O’Reilly talks about Open Source licenses, but open source is not the “meat” of the interview:
Some quotes:
There's this great quote from (optical character recognition and speech technology pioneer) Ray Kurzweil. He said, "I'm an inventor, and I started looking at long-term trends because an invention has to make sense in the world in which it was finished, not the world in which it started." A lot of people are doing plans for the world that's rapidly ending, and you have to do your business plan for the world that's coming.
……
The value will be driven up the stack to data. For this I go back to my Amazon and Google examples. Google may have less of a lock. They probably have more of a traditional software lock in that they're just better at what they do. But there's not much difference between Barnesandnoble.com (LLC) and Amazon.com in the software they have. What are different are the customers they have, and the amount of customer contribution to their data.
With eBay it's even clearer. The fact is, it's the critical mass of marketplace buyers and sellers and all the information that people have put in that marketplace as a repository.
So I think we're going to find more and more places where that happens, where somebody gets a critical mass of customers and data and that becomes their source of value.
Great insights: the value of Amazon, Google and eBay derive from their use of the data that customers supply.
-------end J.O. Post
Your observations about the spread out nature of...
"... of US single family detached homes, compared to the aggregated nature of multi-tenant homes in many large population centers elsewhere in the world, makes the US "permanently disadvantaged" compared to those other countries (assuming of course that you believe RBOC broadband has some key significance, going forward)...
... is, imo, well grounded. But again, we automatically defer to what it is that the telco (or in some cases the cabledo) will do in order to overcome those challenges. What about alternative methods of deep fiber, or wireless, delivery that could be supported by an entity other than one of the incumbents? Through sewers, gas mains, line of sight, condominium right of ways, and so on? I think that that is where energy and focus should be spent while the incumbents enjoy their last days on the throne. What do you think?
FAC |
