Verizon To Use New Tech With Old Cables

Ant wrote to mention a ZDNet article about a new initive to get modern high-speed net access into homes utilizing old coaxial cable lines. Right now Verizon digs up streets and lays out expensive fiber to get homes online, but new tech may let them accomplish that task for much less hassle and expense. From the article: "Later this year, it plans to use new technology from the Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) , an industry group that promotes using coaxial cable installed for cable TV to transmit broadband around the home. The organization says that its technology supports speeds up to 270 megabits per second. Because most homes already have coaxial cable installed in several rooms, Verizon can significantly reduce its Fios installation costs by using existing cabling to connect home computers to its broadband service."

Comments

"old" cables?

[keilinw]

I think its a great idea to use "existing" infrastructure to reduce costs and speed up implementation. IMHO a "new" technology using copper is suitable as long as it meets certain criteria (which I'm sure it does). My only beef with the article is in the title -- existing copper cables are not "OLD" technology -- copper has many advantages over fiber in terms of practicality, cost, etc. I'm going to consider that they were referring to "copper" as old... but I don't foresee and sudden disappearance of wires in the near future.

Matt Wong
http://www.themindofmatthew.com

Re:RT..., oh, never mind

[jZnat]

So I'm guessing this is why Comcast is upgrading some areas to 16M/1M connections? I thought cable already used shared fibre lines. Guess I was wrong...

Competition is good; too bad they aren't competing with ISPs from Japan or Korea, else we'd get getting 100M/100M connections for $10-15 a month.

How are they making money?

[Jamori]

Verizon hopes to reduce these costs significantly in 2006. Specifically, it plans to cut the cost of laying new fiber in neighborhoods to $890 per home and reduce the cost of home installation to $715 per home

TFA cites those costs for 2005 as $1,200 and $1,400 respectively.
How exactly is this a profitable business venture when their optimisitc goal is to spend over $1,600 per household for installation of a service that they sell for $40/month, with relatively little commitment to stay with the service?

Re:pushing cable asside...

[Kadin2048]

Bingo.

I think this is the real headline here -- basically what Verizon wants to do is run fiber to your house, to the outside service entrance or basement or whatever, and then unplug the Cable Company's wires from where they attach to the wires inside your house, and plug themselves in there. Then their signal -- instead of the Cable Co.'s -- goes to everyplace you have a cable jack. Which is quite a few places, in many modern homes.

For you, the customer, they can say "hey, you don't need to run Cat 5 all over your house this way" ... while at the same time, cutting the cable company totally out of the picture.

I think it's their way of responding to the Cable Companies who are bundling TV+Highspeed Internet+VOIP packages, where they install a VOIP box and plug your analog phone into it, effectively cutting out the phone company.

Frankly I think it would be better if both companies agreed on a common wiring standard (hey, how about Cat 6 UTP?) and then plugged THAT into whatever network line the customer wanted to use -- whether it was the Cable Co.'s or the Telco's.