Jay, welcome back, our wandering colleague. Did you bring any spices, macaroni or noodles home with you from your distant travels? Are they laying fiber on Silk Road yet? Your absence has been felt.
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Re Y2K, those are some interesting anecdotes re: credit card verification. I guess there weren't a lot of folks shopping at midnight on Dec. 31, eh? I'd venture to say that a lot of other things which are dependent on micros weren't taking place at that time, too.
Like I've said previously, despite knowing that I'll likely be perceived as a stick in the mud: You can lock 'n load those bubblies, but hold off on popping those corks just yet.
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On another thread you asked me some good generic questions which I'd like to address here, since we have the makings of a similarly good generic discussion going on here, as well.
You asked,
"There's SLC (fac: Salt Lake City) and BellSouth ... are any other RBOCs leaning forward into FTTx?"
Not that I am aware of on a public disclosure level. Of course, they have all done this in the labs and in field experiments, but none of the other larger LECs have had articles written about it yet, to the best of my knowledge. Except, perhaps, for BEL which deployed Next Level wares in the Boston (and I'm told in NY City) about two years ago, keeping most of it on trigger now, but they didn't play it up the same way the others you've mentioned do (for some strange reason). And I know from sources right here in FCTF that SBC is pulling deep right now. But again, they are not playing to the accronyms yet.
I know of a couple of municipalities who haven't gotten it right yet. There are some power cooperatives who are gearing up to deploy, but Lord only knows what they will hang on the ends of each strand. Magnetos? -g-
And there are some other bundlers of service who have made claims of bringing services to the home over FTTHs, but these, too, are not fulfilling the optical dream. They are merely packaging services the old way and shipping them over fiber in some smaller housing developments now being built, taking advantage of prebuilt conduits in the street and right of ways. Great idea to at least get the fiber pulled (the finishing piece can take place later), but most existing homes need not apply.
Even the SLC and BLS approaches aren't really all that much to my particular liking, so in my eyes there is virtually no one out there bringing [almost] pure <see qualification re 'almost' below> to the home now, in a new way. I was depending on Dave Horne, Curtis Bemis and others here to tell me how that is going to be done. And I was especially depending on your input to explain that the network itself really doesn't matter at some point, as long as we can toss and catch snippets of object code from here to there. -g-
BLS portends more purity, and in a way they are doing that through the elimination of a great deal of field electronics through the use of Passive Optical Network elements (PONs), but they still insist on embellishing things with their sonet-works and ANSI T1x1/Bellcore GR303 standards. Those are fine for areas which cannot, at the present time, cost-justify optical to the home. But not in the cherry virgin trials which they are conducting in GA right now. Truth be told, though, that's all they've got.
SLC is leaps ahead of the older amplified HFC variant, but they still insist on coaxuating and ar-effing (radio frequency, RFing) it in the last couple thousand feet which has the effect of introducing severe limitations under 1 GHz, maximum, per group of homes passed. This is supposed to support ALL forms of media content, some of it on a contention basis, for: program services, telephony, interactive digital, and Internet access. You can reverse the order of those services in another two years from a capacity utilization perspective.
In each case they are building brand new multi-lane highways right up to the destination to cover the landscape, but they're still using the same old on-off ramps, with only some token improvements, and using horse-drawn buggies to travel over them.
What is your view on the wash-in curve? If BellSouth moves to deploy, what are their constraints? What are the implications for other players if the RBOCs start pushing fiber?"
What's this? Affirmative action? Do I detect a smattering of "restrict the aggressive monopoly in order to give the fledgling startups a chance" here? I think that the unbundling issues need to be resolved for copper and fiber elements first, before we can look at that intelligently. I don't know if fiber has even been considered in this context yet.
One thing that comes to mind is that if the BOCs do bring fiber to the x, and change their protocol suites that they support to be more 'net-centric in nature, it will engender their beginning to operate like cost-effective and affordable carriers to users and other service providers and the world at large. Which is actually a part of their job description in the first place, instead of maintaining artificial caps on the bandwidth they will dole out. That is, in contrast to their usual controls over the supply of bandwidth on copper lines which only serves to keep their prices high.
"What does an aggressive RBOC FTTx scenario look like?"
Can telcos partner with outside contractors and utility companies?
Sure they can.
Can set top boxes now accept digital feeds over fiber links and convert them to the native format for TVs and other appliances?
Yes.
Would fiber to the home yield more bandwidth than the service providers upstream in the central offices and Head Ends could manage?
Probably so. In addition to any other implication of bringing rich amounts of broadband to the home there is the incremental burden at that point of funneling all this bandwidth through the edge and into the core. We've discussed this in the past, but we've never really sat down to analyze this adequately. Suffice it to say that the additional infrastructure that would be needed in the edge and in the core would be very substantial, indeed.
Consider. What if everyone was streaming MTV and HBO in HDTV format over IP from their favorite VSPs (video service providers), instead of using NTSC (national television standards committee) delivery from the local MSOs? Well that's how it'll be some day. But the edge and core infrastructures couldn't support it today in one fell swoop. I believe that this additional load in the IP cloud part itself would be enough of an added deterrent at this time to justify some additional feet dragging on the parts of incumbents. In any event, it certainly wouldn't be an added incentive for them to move forward more quickly on an all-you-can-eat access model.
Which will be a problem if ftth were done all at once, for the sake of discussion. Granted.
"Pure is the answer."
It's beginning to look to me like "almost pure" is going to have to be the answer. I'm still waiting for someone to answer this question of opaqueness that I introduced upstream yesterday, or two days ago, in this discussion.
And that is, if I introduce some form of Ethernet into the mix, even if it is a blisteringly fast 100GbE, I then put an end to the pure optical transparency that existed before on the fiber and in the dwdms. OR, do I? Think about that one for a bit.
Do we concede that pure optical cannot be done in a cost effective way? Or do we simply commingle optically-based Ethernet with other streams and flows which are more conducive to optical transparency?
Later, Frank [who's off to get some ben and jerry's]
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