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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (6693)	7/5/2003 10:35:18 PM
From: ftth	Respond to of 46821

re: 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? Well, I'm not sure I have a good answer since there are no good public numbers on coax distances in HFC networks, but at the root of all this is that coax has much greater BW and lower loss with distance. I'd only be guessing, but my guess is that the average length of the coax portion is in the same ball park as average loop lengths of telco plant. It (the coax) just happens to be capable of a lot larger distance-BW product. I think they both have active gear out to roughly the same distances. A cable MSO's fiber node typically serves 500-2000 homes. I think DLC's are in that same density range. 500 home nodes are more common today for MSO's, though not the smaller operators (not sure if this 500 is typically 4 separate locations, to get down from 2000 to 500, or if it's the original 2000 home location, split in 4 at that site). Anyways, a 500 home node will (as I understand it anyway, and I'm sure this varies) commonly have 4 large coax cables from the node, heading toward the homes, with each of those 4 branching out to reach 125 homes per branch. So the 500 home node can be split twice, to get down to 125 per. Below that they'd have major capex issues. If I recall the 500 home node went on the assumption of about 17% take rates for data (but back then they were using a couple megabits per useras the norm, which sure as heck isn't the case on my cable modem anymore). They sure aren't splitting nodes as they approach 17% take rates...they're splitting user bandwidth in half to achieve the same end. I also think that all the talk about active gear being so evil (by the RBOCs) is very overblown. After all, practically every network in existence today has actives in it. If you search back, it was only shortly after Telecom 96 went in to effect that the RBOCs started emphasizing PON. Coincedence? I think not. PON is much harder to impose unbundling on (i.e. pretty easy for RBOCs to say "sorry, too impractical to add your switch to my fiber, Mr CLEC xyz, since all that's there in that little splice closure is a passive splitter--no power and no room for your switch)"