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Fiber-to-the-Home Internet, TV, Phone in One Box
Brian Stretch writes "This looks like a really neat toy. Internet (PPPoE), CATV, DBS, telephone over one fiber optic cable to the converter box that breaks it down into 10BaseT Ethernet, coax, coax, and three POTS lines. I'd prefer more Internet bandwidth, and DBS and HDTV (from over-the-air broadcast) instead of DBS and CATV... but hey, these things could whack both
Ameritech and Comcast in one shot. Is anyone familiar with these or any competing devices?"
Doesn't it still mandate that telcom's must invest in expensive fiber optic rollouts, where they currently only have analog lines? Last mile may be ONLY a mile, but multiply that by 1000 communities and you have 1000 miles of short-path, difficult to maintain fiber in the field. Currently, fiber while being more versatile is still more expensive than rigid or semi-rigid coax that typically populates last-mile carrier networks.
It took my cable company years and $$$$$$ to replace the splitters to go up to 1000 MHz so they could offer digital TV and internet access. And that was *just* the splitters in the outdoor enclosures. Imagine digging up or laying down new cable...(and it would be fiber so labour would be higher and cable would be more expensive).
This seems like a very good idea for fiber to the door, but without investors willing to inject money into telcoms so they can build their networks, this just doesn't seem in the near future. The specs also don't look too promising --current cable modems can already do 30 Mbps downstream and 10 Mbps upstream, but are capped.
The technology is there, the money just isn't.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
It's a great idea. It combines all of your communincation services into a single package. It consolidates the cost of running all the lines, as well as the maintenance expense. It also has the potential to dynamically divide your bandwidth - if no one is using the phone you may be able to allocate it as extra broadband. If someone invents a new service, just re-allocate for it.
One big question though...
Can anyone find anything resembling a price tag? I Looked over the website and the only refference to money that I could find was an "Investors" link, LOL!
I really hope they succeed, but I wouldn't invest. Too likely to be vaporware.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Actually, it would be considered friendly competition in most areas. In Sacramento, we have AT&T broadband, AT&T cable tv, and pacbell POTS. The only alternative to AT&T broadband cable modem is pacbell DSL (or in the northern sacramento area, surewest DSL). The only alternative to AT&T cable tv is satellite/dss.
The only alternative to pacbell POTS service is cellular/pcs - and the biggest player here? AT&T wireless.
Having another company that can provide TV, phone, and internet access in the neighborhood is quite welcome, and may drive prices down across the board for that area (why would the incumbant broadband/telephone company reduce prices otherwise?)
Any phone system provider is federally mandated to make sure the system is up 99.999% of the time. In fact, they face hefty fines for even ONE minute of downtime of a service area.
It's to their advantage to build redundancy into their distribution system or face the consequences later.
In the case of fiber-based distribution systems, they use a redundant ring (where a signal has a guaranteed redundant path) around their service area to accomplish this. When someone digs a trench and knocks out the service to a single home, it's still possible to run to a neighbor's house and use their phone in an emergency, so the federal regulations don't require complete redundancy on that "last mile".
Therefore, fiber-based telco services are inherently more robust than telco over copper. Not to mention the advantage fiber has in its resistance to electrical/radio interference lightning.
Last I heard in IEEE journal a year ago, this kind of 1-fiber line to your house is more of what Ameritech and Comcast are going to use to thwack the telephone companies, and not vice versa.
After all, it's the cable companies that are already laying digital fiber lines to houses. They probably have some regulatory hurdles to overcome to offer POTS through the lines instead of having to go through the phone monopolies' networks, but with the backing of TW/AOL/etc. this no longer seems insurmountable.
The phone monopolies have limited deployment of digital lines to some prototype high-income (like, millionaire) communities, but even then, I don't think those lines carry TV signals. So the cable companies should be much closer to making this a reality.
I for one wouldn't mind cable taking over my communications, but I'm pretty sure that's just because I had good experiences with TWCNY's Road Runner service and pretty goddamn awful experiences with Verizon.
I just went through the process of having fiber installed to my office by the local cable monopoly in order to get a T3. That's not a cable modem, by the way, and they beat the crap out of the local telephone monopoly when it came to quality and price (cleaner line at a third of the price). Anyway, I watched as they did it.
Fiber is hard to work with. You have to run it all the way back to a powered node... Its not good enough to run it back to a simple splitter. You generally have to fusion-splice it for these applications. Fusion splicing requires special training, expensive equiment and expertise that simple coax does not. No more installation contractors whose "in" was ownership of a van and a $250 course.
You could conceivably run cable from the powered location out to subpanels and then run fiber from the home to the subpanels with jacks rather than splices. By sending out the installers with preterminated lengths in 50' increments and instructing them to coil the excess at the home, it could be done. But if the connectors get dirty, its toast, pulling preterminated fiber is significantly more difficult than pulling unterminated wire, and either way its several times as expensive as coax.
Coax has plenty of bandwidth. Do you have any idea how much bandwidth is available in 60 analog television channels? Any idea how little bandwidth it takes to make a phone call? With a rational combination of the various multiplexing techniques (FDM, TDM, CDM) and an upper bound around 100 for the number of customers served on a particular coax segment, you could easily accomodate enough bandwidth to play one DVD movie, multiple phone calls and high speed internet all at once in each home.
Add a second coaxial cable and you can triple the number served on a segment by moving the head-end transmissions to one cable and the subscriber transmissions to the other. But best of all: Joe in a truck can still install the service in a subscriber's home without costing the company a fortune.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Yup, termination is a bitch. I've done lots of twisted pair crimps and punch-downs, so I figured going to fiber (to string across my yard to another building) would be trivial.
Nope.
Oh sure, you can buy any kind of fiber you want at Graybar or mail-order, but then you have to terminate it. Short of these technical school COURSES that claim to teach you how to do it, there's no quick way to make it happen.
With my twisted pair stuff, another guy showed me the technique and gave me the color codes. With fiber, there are all sorts of steps you have to follow, and special equipment for each one. You have to cut it just right, polish, glue the connector in, and so on. I'm probably missing a few steps since I threw in the towel.
APC (yeah, the UPS people) makes a 50 meter long length of patch-grade fiber. I finally just bought that and buried it in the yard. It was easier than trying to do it the "right" way.
There are several vendors building hardware in this space. For example, a bunch of my friends and former Packet Engines coworkers started World Wide Packets, which builds boxes that amount to the same thing. They're a two year old startup that is waiting for a market to appear for their hardware. Their stuff rocks, but they only make equipment and don't control the deployment.
FYI Packet Engines was acquired by Alcatel in late 1998. They managed to bungle their way through the acquisition of several companies in a short time, completely crushing out of existence some very promising technology through truly appalling corporate stupidity during what was the biggest boom time in history for ethernet and IP routing infrastructure manufacturers.
Alas, Packet Engines and nearly all of the others are now almost completely gone.
FTTH is already available to a few communities in the Houston 'burbs. The installer is Clearworks, a subsidiary of Eagle Broadband. They have also begun installations in the Austin area.
http://www.clearworks.com/
The fiber is run to new homes already installed with ethernet networks during the construction phase.
They now advertise 10 Megabit service, but early reports from customers indicated speeds much closer to synchronous 100 Mb. Apparently, the funny part was customers trying to test the speed. It required several simultaneous downloads because of the lack of 100 Mb offerings.
They have different digital packages, but phone, internet and 200 channel "cable" was reported at about 100 bucks/month. There is significant savings with bundled services. Where can I sign up?
Kutztown PA. is currently in the process of installing Fiber-to-the-Home, and should be up and running within a few months. No prices have been announced yet, but seeing is this is a very heavily college student populated town (I being one of them), and all college students are bandwidth hungry, how could the Borough say no? More information can be found here: http://www.kutztownboro.org/TelecomWeb2001.htm