[qi:051] The biggest knock on Fiber To The Home (FTTH) technology is that it is too expensive, especially the gear. Some hardware vendors are working hard to bring down those costs. You can expect many such announcements at the FTTP Conference that will kick off tomorrow in Florida. These might not be the big breakthroughs, they are the vital baby steps that are needed if the FTTH hype has to become a reality.
Corning (GLW) will introduce its new ClearCurve, an ultra-bendable fiber-based suite of products, at the conference. These fibers overcome the big problem with fiber — if bent, curved or twisted too much, the signals degrade by a significant degree.
Peter F. Volanakis, president and chief operating officer at Corning, points out that this new cable design will led to reduced size and improved performance of bulky hardware cabinetry. Corning says it will make fiber competitive with traditional copper wire.
At the same event, Neophotonics, a San Jose, Calif.-based startup, is going to introduce a new line of pluggable GPON transceivers. These are optical devices that are used in the equipment that goes in the FTTP central office, and also in the Optical Networking Units (ONU) that go into a customer’s home. In other words, these new transceivers will bring down the costs of the FTTH equivalent of cable or DSL modems a few notches.
Cost Saving Network Fiber Drop:
You might want to take a look at a series of products from GarrettCom. They have a series of Hardened Fiber Switches (http://www.garrettcom.com/6kq.htm) that will allow a provider to deploy a Fiber Switch at any drop point on the Fiber that cost effectively drops off 4 each 10/100Mbps ports. In addition they provide for a fully redundand fail over ring design based on their S Ring architecture.
This fits nicely in a Muni Network delivering true Broadband Gateway links to Mesh Nodes.
Jim
The new fiber product is a small step forward, but they need to ensure that contractors avoid treating it like copper… Its benefits could easily be oversold and misused. Even some Corning folks are recommending that installers should still fall back on the accepted standards for fiber loss around bends as much as possible.
The bigger question is: Why does the average person need it? HDTV could be the biggest reason eventually, but there are very few consumer applications that really require a lot of bandwidth (at least here in the U.S.). FTTH won’t become significantly cheaper until a lot more people actually need it.
Mike
MultifamilyTechnology.com
Mike: Why does the average person need it?
Its the Killer app question more in the form of the chicken and the egg. Do you have the bandwidth first or the app first? Thats a tricky question, and I have no historic references to cite however when you think about it developers might take the bandwidth before the app route. It really doesn’t seem to make sense to develop and great application that will not be usable due to the current state of connections in the country, maybe develop a service that will be enhanced by better speed but that probably wont bring the need be higher speeds either.
People need these speeds because of foward thinking. Most times we aren’t talking about a person on a connection but a family or small group of people. IPTV is something that seem promising and doesn’t need to be lock to you service provider and there is the all too unpredictable future. This will be really the first time we’ve upgraded the medium of which the interent will travel, DSL was the same medium different technology, cable runs over the same medium we’ve had for video, and wireless is a different beast. Looking foward to how data is being sent it seems best to build now for the future nees.
Dan,
We do intend to look at the “power over fibre” market when we secure our next round of funding. Efficiencies are around 50% at the moment and the only supplier is JDSU, a lot depends on how much power is needed but I guess it is theoretically possible to power an ONT with the same fibre as the data.
Regards
Kevin
@Stuart:
I completely agree about the chicken and egg scenario, and I look forward to a day when those “future needs” become current needs. Here in the US, it clearly doesn’t make sense to develop applications for 50-100 Mbps when most of the country is chugging along at 1-10 Mbps or worse.
My best guess is that we’re still years, if not decades, away from that day — simply because we’re stuck with a 100 years’ worth of the old medium in most cases. Very few property owners want to pay to upgrade, and at least for now, only Verizon and a handful of second-tier FTTH providers are investing heavily in that “forward thinking.”
Mike