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

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (1825)	8/4/1998 9:35:00 PM
From: Hiram Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

Frank, the tree and branch is only for Oak's now. Most new HFC installations are distributed star,like 21st Century. Tree and branch won't cut it,unless you are an Owl looking for a place to land. Hiram

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (1825)	8/5/1998 2:23:00 AM
From: Ray Jensen	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 12823

Frank, here's my take on the issue of traditional tree & branch architectures (or distributed star topologies, or whatever other name fits). First, its hard to believe we are approaching 1999, and most ILECs in the US still install nothing but direct buried copper pair cables as distribution facitilies throughout new residential subdivisions. Not even a spare conduit to avoid nasty street excavations sometime in the future when copper pairs finally give way to some other medium. As some other recent posts have mentioned here, ILEC momentum to deploy new technology (i.e., other than copper pair based DSL) in the distribution plant appears to be near dead. That's another reason why I no longer work for an ILEC. Over the past five years or so, most cable companies that design and build HFC have used an architecture that allows fiber migration to progress closer to the customer in the future. Some people refer to this as a Super D design. I don't know who came up with that name, but Super D means that you never place a distribution tap between amplifier locations in the coaxial plant. Taps, which connect with drops to the home, are only placed beyond a distribution or tap amplifier, with a terminating tap at the end of a coax cable. Fiber nodes serve coaxial distribution areas that are broken into quadrants or tridents, each of which can be fed directly in the future with fiber, without disturbing the remainder of the coaxial distribution plant towards the customer (including the distribution legs with taps and drops). Another good thing is that many cable companies place coax cable in high density poly duct when building in below ground plant areas, so moving fiber closer into the coaxial distribution plant, one amplifier at a time, is often feasible without much additional trenching activity. Time should prove that cable companies which implement HFC with reasonable sized fiber nodes (i.e., serving 500 or so customers) will be in a better position to provide even more bandwidth to customers for far less churn and retrofits of existing networks than ILECs twisted pair networks. If cable companies run out of bandwidth using 750 MHz HFC fiber nodes serving 500 home nodes that also employ some type of reverse path spectrum efficiency, it means they would be making a lot of money on 2 way services like cable modem and telephony. My approach to future "collision problems" deeper in a neighboorhood is really quite simple. 1. When placing fiber cable in a local loop (ILEC, CLEC, CATV, or whoever), upsize the fiber count as much as possible. 2. When opening a trench for any type of cable, always throw in a spare 1.25" smoothwall high density poly duct, to come back later and pull in the right size fiber cable for ultimate bandwidth needs. Does that answer the question? RJ