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Broadband Access
Commentary
Fiber is hanging at the node and neighborhood
Incumbent operators find utility in FTTN technology
by Sean Buckley, Editor in Chief
Okay, I will admit it I am a bit jealous of my web editor Sam Bookman and her Verizon FiOS Fiber to the Home (FTTH) network connection.
Living along the Interstate 95 highway in the town of Newton, Mass., Sam is one of the lucky few who can actually get FTTH service from Verizon.
Despite suffering initial issues with getting the voice service to work correctly after multiple truck rolls and an underwhelming Video on Demand (VOD) library, she tells me the Internet speed blows out the doors of what we can get in the office here in Norwood, Mass.
What this suggests is that FTTH, despite all of its great potential, is far from being a mainstream last mile medium.
But the challenge of building out a FTTH network is not just a technology challenge; it’s also a marketing and availability challenge.
I started thinking about the issues of expanding FTTH to a large audience while talking to Teresa Mastrangelo, the principal analyst at broadband trends.com, about Zhone’s latest IP DSLAM product.
Having both attended last year’s FTTH Europe Council Conference in Paris, France, we recalled how France Telecom, another aggressive provider of FTTH with over 300,000 homes passed was having issues not so much with PON or the technology, but their ability to market the service.
“The problem France Telecom said was they can’t market in the same we would market their other services,” said Mastrangelo. “When you just have pockets of availability, you have to go door to door and tell people the service is available, and it’s a very expensive acquisition process because there’s no scale they can leverage on their marketing. Whereas when you have copper you don’t have those obstacles in the way; everyone has the copper and it’s being able to just add a new service to a building or a faster speed or whatever the operator is choosing to do with that VDSL2 link.”
Service providers remain divided
When it comes to last mile fiber investments, service providers remain divided on how far to push fiber to the customer.
Outside of the aggressive U.S. FTTH purveyors like Verizon, most incumbent service providers are really at a crossroads in building out their last mile fiber networks.
Verizon’s two Baby Bell brothers Qwest and AT&T are taking a more prudent approach that leverages FTTN in existing builds and FTTP in new Greenfield scenarios.
Qwest, for instance, has launched an aggressive FTTN campaign. Just a few months after officially debuting its Titanium and Quantum FTTN services, the provider said its FTTN network can reach over one million potential customers in 18 of its markets. By the year end, the Denver, CO-based ILEC hopes to get to 20 markets served.
With over 75 percent of its copper plant buried, the economics to plow through customer’s yards and streets become even more prohibitive. And while he acknowledges the savvy of Verizon’s FTTH drive, Pieter Poll, the CTO of Qwest, said in a previous interview that he’s confident that FTTN will give it more than enough gas to continue its broadband service journey.
“For Qwest, fiber to the node is the strategy that makes sense to us, and we fundamentally believe with the technologies we’re bringing in we have significant amount of headroom in terms of consumer demand on how they would use that pipe,” he said. “With pair bonding, we’re targeting 40 Mbps capability going into our distribution areas.”
The FTTN drive is not just a large incumbent operator’s play, however. Smaller independent ILECs such as New Mexico-based Tularosa Basin Telephone Company, which interestingly enough was formed when its holding company members bought four old US West/Qwest exchanges, is also building a two-pronged network.
On one side, it is replacing 60 percent of its existing copper plant with FTTH, and the other 40 percent will be based on FTTN with ADSL2+ over Occam Networks IP equipment. (see: NXTcomm 2008: Tularosa Telephone takes on the triple play)
Fiber goes to the basement
Along with the well-publicized battles in the U.S. to overthrow the cable company’s monopoly in getting access to an Multi-Dwelling Units (MDU’s) riser to install network cabling the MDU market is a ripe market for solutions that can leverage the existing copper plant that resides at the facility.
Corning, a major optical fiber vendor, predicts that MDU FTTX deployments could exceed 10 million per year by 2012. In an MDU deployment, the service provider can take a fiber right into a basement, install it into an IP DSLAM and deliver sizeable bandwidth over the existing short copper loops.
VDSL2, for instance, can deliver up to 100 Mbps of bandwidth on short very short distances of copper.
Along with Verizon’s aggressive MDU push in high profile cities like New York City, service providers outside the U.S. are very keen to deploy fiber into a basement and then leverage existing copper via the use of either ADSL2+ or VDSL2 in the existing riser to deliver services to the customer.
Take Bell Canada, which recently extended its ongoing FTTN deployment and services into MDUs. Bell Canada’s argument to extend FTTN services into MDUs, as pointed out by Kevin Krull, President of Bell Canada’s Residential Services was relatively simple: “More and more Bell Internet customers in our largest markets are living in condominium developments and other new MDUs.”
Extending fiber to MDUs in Canada and in other regions like Asia Pacific and Europe really should not be all that surprising.
Unlike the U.S., where MDUs are eclipsed outside the major cities by sprawling suburban single-family home communities, in other countries like Europe and APAC where the population density is greater, MDU deployments would be more prevalent.
Searching for options
Knowing that the cable guys are working hard at raising the bar to leverage their existing coax to deliver enhanced video, voice and data, traditional telcos are obviously keen on offering solutions that can effectively compete with cable.
And while service providers do want to have FTTH products in their quiver, they also want hybrid options that allow them to leverage existing copper plant if it’s still viable to deliver advanced services including gaming, online video and even IPTV.
Not only do they want all the bandwidth capabilities that a FTTN product can bring, but the ability to accommodate multiple scenarios that can make the best out of their existing copper plant: a CO, outside plant cabinet or an MDU deployment.
To accommodate a service provider’s desire to shorten their copper loops from typical distances from 12,000 down to 5,000 to 3,000 feet from a customer, I have seen a good amount of action by the vendor community (e.g., ADTRAN's 1100 Series and Zhone's Bitstorm IP DSLAMs) with new platforms that can accommodate various deployment scenarios.
Zhone’s Bitstorm RP can, for example, be deployed at a street cabinet, CO or in an MDU basement. (see: Zhone expands copper’s boundaries)
In fact, the Broadband Forum and its research partner Point Topic in a recent report on IPTV subscriber growth confirmed ADSL2+ is the reigning last mile access champ for delivering IPTV and other services. Despite the ongoing rise of FTTH (FTTH connection rose 33 percent since the beginning of 2007), ADSL2+ is the frontrunner technology for IPTV deployments with 12,049,817 subscribers.
With ADSL2+ and VDSL2 being the frontrunner access technologies, the vendor community understands that the service provider’s last mile fiber rollouts aren’t going to be a one-size fits all scenarios.
“All vendors are finding that there’s no single architecture that meets the needs of every operator, so vendors like Zhone are looking at all the different ways to leverage the equipment they have, modify it, repackage it to continue to provide solutions that help their operators drive new services.”
So whether it’s an MDU, an outside cabinet or just going into an existing neighborhood with fiber, the fact is service providers are hot on fiber, but they want it on terms that fit their deployment needs and service missions.
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