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Carrier Services
NAB Show: FTTH means never having to say you need IPTV
There’s enough bandwidth that RF television is still an option while IPTV bugs work out
by Jim Barthold
One generally unheralded attribute of a fiber-to-the-home
network is telcos can get into the television business without
necessarily getting into IPTV, instead saving that big step for
a later time.
Many large service providers “are waiting to see the five
millionth subscriber to IPTV” before moving off RF and, since
FTTH has more than enough capacity to reliably handle RF
video transport, those operators can continue to wait for the
IPTV killer ap and still deploy competitive or winning video
television services, said Joe Savage, president of the FTTH
Council.
Savage updated North American FTTH during a second day
panel session, “All-Optical Access—Video Quality, Long Tails
and Market Share” at the Telecom2008 conference at the
National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas.
FTTH, he said, now passes almost 12 million homes or about
10 percent of the U.S. homes and “folks are signing up pretty
rapidly to subscribe” to fiber-centric video services with just
under three million fiber-fed TV subscribers in the country,
most of whom belong to Verizon.
“We still have work to do to get to the commercial service
levels of FTTH in North America,” he said, but that work will be
helped by the “technical advantages that turn into interesting
user advantages” for those who connect the fiber to their
homes.
There is, for instance, an advantage in the breadth of the
bandwidth that a fiber conduit can deliver. It “results in
slightly higher high definition quality” than cable’s coaxial
plant and significantly better quality than the squeezed MPEG-
4 offerings of twisted pair. Additionally, telcos needn’t
squeeze voice services into IP to save bandwidth as cable
operators, using a hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) architecture, are
doing, he said.
“Voice-over-IP is somewhat better than cellular but not quite
a good as picking up the old black telephone,” Savage said.
Video, whether IPTV or RF, “happens to be much cleaner”
and “almost error free” over a fiber link.
Best of all, he offered for telcos, take-up rates for IPTV
services offered via FTTH are better than those over non-fiber
which run typically in the 20 percent range. Generally, IPTV
take-up among fibered homes runs in the 28 percent range
which, Savage said, falls “on the good side of the business
plan.” Outside Verizon, arguably the biggest fiber deployer,
the numbers get even better, climbing to about 50 percent
among 593 service providers delivering some amount of
FTTH. Two hundred or so systems that have greenfield FTTH
deployments have subscription rates running from 30 to 85
percent he said.
“Technology does translate into market success,” he said.
In greenfields, in fact, technology coupled with market trends,
can even translate into savings.
“In greenfields the cost of copper has gone up so much that
it’s cheaper to put in fiber than copper,” Savage concluded.
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