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Good News From The High-Speed Networking Front
Degrees writes "Over at Small Times there is an article about two Danish companies that want to make deploying fiber optic lines easier with MEMS-based packaging technology. (MEMS is Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems - described here). Also mentioned is that the big three U.S. telcos are working on fiber to the home plans." And punkmac points to this eWeek article which begins "An Intel Corp. backed startup, SolarFlare Communications Inc. said Monday that it has developed a working prototype of a chip that will permit 10G-bps communications over standard CAT5e copper wiring. SolarFlare's chip will be used as evidence that 10G-bit over copper can be done, in anticipation of a draft IEEE standard to be developed later this year."
The EETimes carried this same story with more technical details and a few criticisms as a cover story in the week's paper edition. It's also available online here at the EEtimes website.
10Gbps over copper was done, over limited distances, by Nortel three years ago. It's not new. In fact they are working with 40Gbps now, though not over copper, yet.
The technology ofr literally blistering speed is already available and hass been for some time. Additionally, it is not that expessive, relatively speaking, to offer speed that are significantly higher than todays broadband offerings. But, people keep bringing up the fibre to the home story and this is where the whole thing falls apart.
While new developments may indeed get fibre to the home but, no provider is going to "rewire". If they already have copper in the ground they are not going to upgrade. Why? Because of the cost.
Providers are already getting top dollar providing anything from 128Kbps (sometimes less) to 2Mbps. There is no incentive for them to make the massive capital outlay needed to bury fibre on routes that are already served by copper. It is unlikely that their customers will pay $100 per month versus the $50 that the providers already get for broadband so, there is no real demand to motivate the providers. Even new services like video on demand work adequately well over copper to negate the need for revamping the infrastructure.
No, providers will continue to offer the same services over their copper infrastructure and when things become saturated they will start to penalize people that use it the most. This is already happening with Comcast and AT&T.