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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MikeM54321 who wrote (7499)	7/6/2000 3:17:36 PM
From: lml	Respond to of 12823

Good snippet, Mike.

To: MikeM54321 who wrote (7499)	7/6/2000 6:45:09 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12823

Hello Mike, A form of VDSL delivery has been a part of the FSAN vision since the inception of FSAN as a last mile framework, back in the mid-Nineties. Even going back to its original draft format, it was envisaged that VDSL-like payload carrying would take place over all three forms of media into the home, which one (or two), exactly, depended on unique circumstances: fiber, and/or coax and/or twisted pair. I believe that there were combinations of the three where two, say, fiber and twisted pair would be used, or fiber and coax. Some of these decisions may have had to do with devising adequate means in supplying carrier-provided battery for life line services. In fact, Next Level's (and others') FSANs which employ passive optical networks (PONs) close to residential clusters have employed VDSL technology in the last thousand feet or so for several years now. Does VDSL clash with FTTH, and do I think that the latter is a more optimal approach? [Smile.] At some point, probably much sooner than later, aided greatly by encroaching competition from non-tradtional players, an inflection point will occur signaling when the construction capital costs of perpetuating old beliefs that support the VDSL approach will begin to outweigh their benefits in comparison to those which could be found on fiber. These tradeoffs will be both obvious, hard-dollar ones, in the case of initial implementation costs as a measure of cost per unit of delivery, and soft benefits, which derive from greater functionality engendered by the speed of fiber, which, ultimately, leads to far more traffic, thus enabling more hard dollar benefits in the end. The reason that VDSL doesn't surpass ADSL today is because of both its higher cost and its dependency on distribution nodes near the residence. In contrast, many (most?) aDSL services originate from central offices over greater distances, up to three or more miles away, making them easier to install and less expensive at the same time. And even the ADSL services which launch from field nodes (NGDLCs) aren't always distanced properly to support VDSL, either. Rather, these field nodes could sometimes themselves also be up to two or three miles from their intended end points, where they will remain until the next step in the evolutionary process of pushing fiber even deeper towards the end user. --------- Projections of when certain speeds will be attained have always been an interesting topic to me. I've recently read Kim Maxwell's Residential Broadband and found some of his projections to fit this point rather well. For example, in 1997 (the book is copyrighted 1998) Maxwell cited an end game for fiber to the home (which he states repeatedly, by the way) coming into its own in the next twenty to thirty years. I found this a little daunting and unrealistic, until I read his predictions about how long it would take 100 Mb/s Ethernet in enterprise networks to reach end users. Maxwell was projecting that enterprise LAN users would be migrating to 100 Mb/s speeds, a process that could take up to 10 years (meaning by 2007, if I back into the time of the writing and project forward). In contrast, most if not all of my clients (along with most other large enterprises, and most everyone else with even an Ethernet starter kit today) have migrated their desktops to 100 Mb/s already. Many of them switched, not even shared. All of which means that his projections were at least three times longer than what reality has shown. And Internet Time is accelerating, not slowing down. So, who knows what the trajectory for fiber to the home is now, based on his original estimates? BTW, this anomaly notwithstanding, I found the book very well worth the read. "Residential Broadband : An Insider's Guide to the Battle for the Last Mile" by Kim Maxwell, Kimberly Maxwell Paperback - 352 pages (November 1998) John Wiley & Sons; ISBN: 0471251658