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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here
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To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (3824)5/20/1999 3:14:00 PM
From: DenverTechie  Read Replies (2) of 12823
 
I love these kinds of articles. I really do.

They try to sum up in a few sentences an entire architecture approach and wax philosophical about the long term implications for world peace that could result.

Seriously, though, the 50 to 75 homes passed node is nothing new. It has been studied, modeled and even built previously in other places. Just never in such a large location as Salt Lake. In a nutshell, the low homes passed count per node does increase reliability substantially, also the bandwidth that can be delivered for cable modems and telephone. It is an architecture known in the industry as "fiber deep" and has not been built too often due to the much higher cost to go fiber deep. Is there revenue that will flow to justify the higher cost? Maybe yes, if you can sell digital cable, telephone and high speed access in a bundle to a high penetration rate in the small size node.

I'd also like to clarify the need for the power coming from a "central source". That is not for the cable modems' high speed access. It is strictly for the local telephone. We've been over this before. Powering for telephone is one of the great dilemmas of cable telephone. This article is saying they are doing away with local battery power at each home. The other "central source" has typically been the power supply located at each node. This is NOT the same as the central power that your local telephone company uses at its Central Office. The node power supplies are distributed throughout the network and provided with generator or battery backup at each fiber node in case the commercial power goes out.

Now, if ATA&T has figured out a way to power this network "just like the traditional phone network does" they would have to have retrofitted the entire network in Salt Lake and set up a large power distribution center at each headend. That has not happened to my knowledge. Also, fiber will not carry power, so there would have to be a cable conducting power along with the fiber to all locations. An alternative would be a new kind of fiber cable that has power conductors built into it. That is possible, but I don't think one has been approved by the NESC (National Electric Safety Code)at this time (SNET tried this approach a while back and it was deemed out of code and a safety hazard). So my take on the article is give them about B-. They got a lot of it right, but seem confused on the powering issue.

Conclusion: the fiber deep architecture they are testing is a good one if you can afford it, and the move away from home powered cable telephony is also a good choice.
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