Would You Like Analog With That? Fiber-to-the-Home
Products Catch on
9/22/99 By R. Winn Hardin
The real estate industry is not the only beneficiary of the North American housing
boom. New residential construction has also given providers of fiber-to-the-home
solutions a chance to prove their merit. The dark horse in the race to achieve the
most economical broadband access platform, passive optical networks (PONs)
are gaining acceptance in several new residential developments.
Fiber-to-the-home equipment manufacturer Optical Solutions, Inc. (Minneapolis,
MN) landed its third major customer of 1999 when All West Communications, an
independent local exchange carrier based in Kamas, UT, contracted for a
200-unit residential deployment in August. The first of these customers will be
on-line in six months.
The All West deal follows a 20,000-unit commitment from Futureway
Communications Inc. (Concorde, ON). Futureway recently completed testing of
Optical Solutions' FiberPath fiber-to-the-home system in the Greater Toronto
area. “We've driven [FiberPath] very, very hard in our diligence checking and we're
real excited about what we're doing,” says Herb Thompson, Futureway executive
vice president.
“We're targeting to install up to 3000 UDP's before the frost in six different
subdivisions," Thompson reports. "We have a commitment with Optical Solutions
for 20,000 units, but we've had so much interest that once we go live next week
(Sept. 15), we already know that we'll be swamped with other opportunities. So
the speculation for next year is that we'll go well beyond the 20,000 units.”
Optical Solutions' FiberPath PON system handles analog and digital video, voice,
and data. The system's operating software lets network operators provision phone
and cable TV service remotely, reducing truck rolls and maintenance costs.
Three singlemode fibers connect the central office to the drop nodes, and one pair
connects the drop node and the Optical Solutions' patented Universal
Demarcation Point (UDP) at the home (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Fiber-to-the-home platform handles analog CATV at 850 MHz as well as digital signals,
buying time for service providers to make the inevitable switch to digital video at the head end.
All West's primary concern in procuring a new access platform was analog and
digital capability, reports CEO Vernile Prince. "We have a cable TV head, which
is analog, and it would be very expensive to convert that to digital at this point,"
he says. "Optical Solutions was the only [manufacturer] we could find that would
handle the analog video."
Although analog capability sold Prince on FiberPath, not everyone in the fiber
access space is bullish on including analog signals. Major service providers will
soon shake off the last vestiges the analog era, predicts Gerry Pesavento,
president of Optical Solutions rival Alloptic Inc. (Davis, CA).
"I don't think that anyone would argue that the local loop is going to move from
analog to digital broadband. The local loop is going to change to a broadband
network and the CATV [coaxial] network is going to provide that,” Pesavento
says. “You can see what AT&T is doing with TCI's network. They're preparing
that network to migrate towards digital services."
Alloptic is developing a broadband voice, video, and data fiber-in-the-loop platform
that uses digital layer network overlays to leverage existing optical, copper, and
coax infrastructures. The company intends to have its first product line
commercially available within the next year.
Customer premise equipment
In the meantime, Optical Solutions is shipping product. Reducing the size of the
UDP was a significant part of the most recent product release, FiberPath v.1.5,
says Optical Solutions president and CEO Asim Saber. Engineers reduced the
unit size by approximately two-thirds, producing a package about the size of an
electrical meter box.
The UDP and cable management enclosure includes connections for local or
remote electrical supply m-traps for premium cable TV channels and a back up
battery. Because FiberPath only consumes a few watts of power, providers can
choose between a 6-year Panasonic 12V battery (identical those used in home
security systems), six standard D-cell batteries, or local hardwired electrical
supply.
The UDP provides connections for six TR-57 loop-start POTS, 860 MHz of analog
cable TV or digital TV, and scalable data in 64 Kb/s increments to a maximum of
10 Mb/s downstream and 2.5 Mb/s upstream. Within the home, the UDP
converts signals to twisted pair, coax, Category 5, and RG-45 connections.
Sometime next year, FiberPath v.2.0 will include an integrated Ethernet
connection for 10/100 Mb/s transmission.
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