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Technology Stocks : Newbridge Networks -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Luc N. who wrote (9897)	2/28/1999 11:34:00 AM
From: nord	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18016

canet2.net A very nice ref. article One of last great impediments to wide scale and rapid deployment of the Information Society is the "last mile" issue. This paper outlines some of the issues and history of the last mile problem and proposes a research and development program leading to early deployment of extreme high speed Internet access to schools and libraries which will then underpin an architectural framework for high speed Internet access to the home - Gigabit Internet to the Home (GITH). The proposed GITH strategy calls for the deployment of a third residential network service operating in parallel with existing telephone and cable delivery mechanisms and thereby avoiding the regulatory and technical hurdles of integrating traditional telephone and cable services into one common delivery mechanism. The "divergence" of these services rather than "convergence" may allow for early and rapid deployment of GITH perhaps in advance of the currently planned large scale rollouts of cable modem and xDSL services. Over time the GITH service may also incorporate voice telephony and cable TV services. Although there are many research issues that need to be addressed such as scaling, integrated layer 3 optical services and network management an economically viable architecture may be possible that incorporates competitive equal access at both the physical and logical layers, by using low cost Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) equipment, and new Internet architectural concepts currently under development in CANARIE's optical Internet network -CAnet 3. It is estimated that a GITH system would cost less than Hybrid Fiber Coax (HFC) systems currently being deployed and would be marginally more expensive than xDSL or Cable Modem services. The access bandwidth could scale from as little as a few megabits per second to a mind boggling several terabits per second using either individual dedicated fibers, dedicated wavelengths, logical switched paths or direct statistical multiplexing in a neighborhood router on a chip called a "routing puck". Governments can play a key role in accelerating the deployment of a GITH network by requiring service providers who want to provide public funded Internet service to schools and libraries to deploy at the same time a GITH network infrastructure that would easily scale to support thousands of homes with competitive equal access. The early market pull of GITH network may be "always on" applications, multimedia "push" services, mega e-mail, DWDM caching, and DVD video applications. THIS IS A DISCUSSION PAPER. THE IDEAS AND CONCEPTS PRESENTED IN THIS PAPER IN NO WAY REFLECT OR REPRESENT THE POSITION OR VIEWS OF THE CANARIE BOARD AND/OR ITS MANAGEMENT. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Table of Contents 1.0 Introduction 2.0 Historical Perspective 2.1 Cable and xDSL Modems 2.2 Wireless local loop 2.3 FSAN - FTTx Technologies 3.0 A Radical New Concept for the last mile Issue 3.1 The Business Case for a GITH Network 4.0 A Possible Architecture for a GITH network 4.1 Neighborhood Competitive Access Interconnection Point 4.2 DWDM in the metro area and to the home 4.3 Passive Optical Networking 4.4 The Routing Puck 4.5 Statistical Multiplexing 4.6 Minimizing State 5.0 Gigabit Applications to the Home 5.1 DVD Video 5.2 Mega e-mail attachments 5.3 DWDM caching 5.4 Multimedia Push and Always On Applications 6.0 Next Steps 7.0 Acknowledgements 8.0 References and Bibliography ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1.0 Introduction In recent years there have been major advances in the speed and capacity of Internet backbone networks such as the CANARIE optical Internet, CAnet 3. These networks offer a dramatic increase in bandwidth and quality of service for new advanced multimedia applications. As well, with the advent of innovative competitive service providers such as Qwest, Level 3 and Frontier there has been a significant reduction in prices commensurate with the development of these new service offerings. While there have been dramatic changes in backbone capacities and the number of service providers, high speed local access to the home and individual businesses has been considerably slower to develop. Solving the "last mile" problem is one of the last grand challenges facing the research community, government and industry. The realization of a Gigabit Internet to the Home (GITH) network will truly allow the wide scale deployment of new high speed multimedia services and the ultimate realization of the information society. Canada has the highest penetration of cable and TV services in the world and is probably the most advanced nation in terms of competitive local access facilities access due to an enlightened regulatory climate. As such, in many ways Canada is in a unique position to be one of the few countries capable of deploy Gigabit Internet to the Home because of its high urban population density and large penetration of deployed fiber in most major metropolitan and suburban neighborhoods due to the high penetration of cable TV and competitive local access fiber. The Government of Canada and CANARIE have a proud history and an enviable record of taking on similar grand challenges in accelerating the deployment of the information highway in Canada. Through this unique industry government partnership Canada has been the first country in the world to deploy a national optical Internet and the first with a public commitment to connect every school to the Internet by the year 2000. The obvious next challenge is the grandest and biggest challenge of all: connecting every Canadian home, school and business to the Internet with high speed access. This partnership of government leadership and industrial world class optical Internet technology presents Canada, once again with a unique opportunity - to be the first country in the world to deploy ultra high speed Internet access to every Canadian home and truly make Canada the first connected nation in the world. The advent of low cost high bandwidth to the home may usher in a new world of applications where the network, in effect, becomes the computer. Currently there are few traditional applications that require bandwidth to the home in excess of a few megabits per second. But the same story was true for the personal computer, where 15 years ago there were few applications that required more than kilobytes of memory and all the data could be easily stored on a single floppy disk. It is now difficult to conceive of operating a PC with anything less than 32 Mbytes of memory and a 2 gigabyte drive. It is expected that high bandwidth applications will follow a similar evolutionary path once high bandwidth is routinely available at low cost to the home, school and office. Schools, libraries and universities are currently the some of the biggest consumers of Internet service. Schools in particular have a pressing demand to increase their Internet capacity. Most schools are poorly served with low speed data lines. As multimedia instruction, educational streaming video and other services become increasingly popular, the demand for higher speed Internet access will be insatiable. The Federal government, in partnership with CANARIE and the provinces, is working actively to get every school and classroom connected to the Internet. A significant part of that program is to augment the basic Internet service with policy based caching and satellite multicast services. But these are seen only as interim measures. Inevitably, as each classroom is connected to the Internet, educators will want access to their own video and multimedia data suitable for their classroom's age group and interests. It is quite conceivable that in a couple of years schools and universities will require 10's of megabits of bandwidth if not 100's of megabits of bandwidth. In the past governments have responded to this demand mostly in an ad hoc manner by purchasing circuits from their local carrier or cable company. However, this ad hoc investment perhaps could be used more effectively to leverage the construction of a "future proof" infrastructure that will lead to early deployment GITH. Government can play a critical role in accelerating the deployment of GITH by insisting that service providers who win contracts for delivery of Internet to the school install a competitive equal access infrastructure that will scale to high speed Internet delivery to the home. As described further in this document there are many last mile access technologies including wireless, satellite, xDSL and cable modem services. While the capital cost of GITH to the home may be substantially greater than these alternatives it's life cycle costs are significantly longer. The biggest single cost component of GITH is the installation of the fiber itself, whether it is in the ground or on poles. Governments and large utilities have the resources to raise money for 20 to 30 year life cycle infrastructures such as roads, bridges and hydro facilities. As such government again can play a key role in the early deployment of a GITH network by leveraging its capability to easily raise infrastructure money for the deployment of such a network. One possible model would be for government to initially underwrite the infrastructure costs of deploying Gigabit Internet to the School and pay down the construction bond or loan by leasing or selling access to either the fiber or conduit on a shared condominium basis. Table of Contents 2.0 Historical Perspective When fiber systems were first deployed in backbone networks it was widely expected that fiber would be quickly deployed to the home. Fiber to the home had a number of attractive benefits particularly to the telephone company in that its intrinsic bandwidth provided a future proof network, low maintenance cost and no susceptibility to electrical interference. The Japanese government probably has the most ambitions plans to wire up ever home in Japan with fiber. In pursuit of this goal considerable research work has been undertaken in Japan in developing high density optical "ribbons" which can support the connection of hundreds of individual fibers from homes to central offices. In North America FTTH was slower to be adopted because of the concern by the carriers of the high cost of trenching the fiber. The inability of fiber to carry electrical current means DC voltage would not be delivered to the home to ensure operation of the phone in the event of a power outage was also seen as a hindrance to wide scale deployment. Instead, throughout the late 1980's and the early 1990's a number of telephone and cable companies initiated broadband to the home trials. These trials focused primarily on video on demand and home shopping services. These trials focused on a number of architecture models including Fiber to the Curb (FTTC), Fiber to the Building (FTTB), Hybrid Fiber Coax (HFC) and Switched Digital Video (SDV). Just about every one of these trials was a failure as there seemed little consumer demand for such services. Despite the initial failures in these earlier trials a number of telephone companies have undertaken a new initiative called FSAN - Full Service Access Network Initiative. FSAN encompasses the network requirements of the various FTTx schemes and is intended to be a full service technology that not only offers high speed Internet delivery to the home but also provides basic telephony and video on demand services. However, in light of the insatiable demand for Internet services to the home and the prospect that all future advance multimedia services would be most likely delivered over the Internet, the telephone and cable companies have begun offering high speed Internet via cable and xDSL (Digital Subscriber Line) modems. This is a significant departure from the original FSAN concepts. In addition to the different FTTx approaches, a number of companies are also looking at using wireless technologies for addressing the last mile problem. These various access technologies will be explored in more depth in the following sections. But sufficed it to say, there are two underlying assumptions to all of these approaches in firstly, that a few megabits of bandwidth may be sufficient for future advanced applications and secondly, a single service provider will be delivering that bandwidth. Regards Norden ps Pat I agree with you re. relative lack of pr from NN. What gives they certainly are amongst the top tier co's. in ATM and yet are often omitted. Seems to me a little more focus from the company on pr is in order!