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100 Mbit/s on Fibre to the home
KeefR writes "According to ct (a german computer magazin), BellSouth is going to provide internet access in Atlanta based on a Passive Optic Network (PON) with a speed of 100 Mbit/s and more. The Network is based on ATM and you get a Fast-Ethernet Port (using some kind of hardware). It's limited to 400 users in the first phase. The first users'll get a 100Mbit/s internet connection, 120 digital and 70 analog video channels and 31 digital audio channels. The cost is about 60 US-$.
The article is in german, translation at babelfish "
While most the discussion has focused on the internet, what BellSouth is doing has greater implications for the future of cable TV. If you noticed, BellSouth is offering 120 channels of digital TV. If they keep building up their infrastructure, they'll have the capabilities to dominate local phone service, internet access, and cable DTV. Given the size of the "Baby" Bells, their is little reason to doubt that they have the resources to win.
Traditional cable companies are eventually going to have to upgrade their infrastructure if they hope to survive. The advent of DTV threatens to choke off cable's available transmission bandwidth. Internet connections constitute a trivial amount of the transmission bandwidth that will be needed in a few years. My guess is that AT&T and the other long-distance carriers are going to provide some of financial backing required to upgrade the local cable network infrastructure.
Ironically, Lucent is providing much of the networking technology that BellSouth is deploying.
Take a peek at what kind of DTV service is available in some parts of Atlanta.
Everything I'm reading here leads me to believe that this is the service that BellSouth is installing for me July 1. If so, that might just make up for the fact that they canceled my appointment for last Friday because "they hadn't turned on the service yet" (after a three week wait already).
The equation -- I just moved into a new home where BellSouth Entertainment is my cable provider, giving me ~120 channels digital (excellent quality picture, if you're wondering), ~70 analog channels on the TV's not connected to a digital converter, and ~30 music channels.
I ordered the "FastAccess" option for $59/month (FastAccess is the "consumer friendly" term BellSouth uses for all of its ADSL and related services). I assumed this was going to be a cable modem, but recent events have made me question this.
The FastAccess installation date was supposed to be last Friday, but on Thursday, as I was counting down the hours, BellSouth called me and told me that the service wasn't turned on for the area yet. They still had some work to do on the technical side of the "fiber system" before it would be ready. The system would be turned on for the area on July 1, and they could install it on that day.
Needless to say I was pretty upset. Pushing off the installation another month after my anticipation had built to the level that it had was infuriating. However, in the midst of my complaining about the fact that they waited until the day before to tell me, I did hear the rep say that this service was over the phone line, not the cable line. In fact, it seemed she didn't even realize this order was placed with the cable division of their company.
Both of the BellSouth installers that worked on my ISDN told me that I have fiber all the way from the CO to my curb, so while I couldn't get ADSL, there was another option coming.
Could I be one of those lucky few? I think it might just be so. Of course for the short term this doesn't seem much better than a DSL or cable modem solution since it will be locked down to 1.5 Mb/s speeds, but at least the speed won't degrade based on distance from the CO. And the possibility of them opening it up to 100 Mb/s in the future boggles my mind.
Anyone want an update when and if this actually happens? What's the best place for this info if you do want it? Here as a response to this article? Should I submit a review of it as a story? Another site?
It's relatively simple. Most high speed services are shared, such as xDSL, etc. We rolled out DSL 'net access before USWest did here in Arizona and it's been quite a learning experience. We didn't care if you were a business or a regular customer, you got DSL for the same price. As time went by however, we had business hosting 50-150 web sites of their DSL line for $24.95/mo, and thus literally trashing our DSL network and making the DSL experience for regular home users *SUCK*.
I can see why cable co's are capping uploads too (here in Phoenix all Cox@home customers have recently been capped at 128kbps uploads (i believe)). If someone runs a server, it's very likely it's going to be actively pushing a LOT of data a LOT of the time. A casual user who's downloading a lot of stuff will not be pumping huge amounts ALL of the time =)
Basically what it comes down to is power-users sometimes get screwed. But you can't rely on 'power-users' for revenue. There's too many regular joe's that use the service without saturating it.
Here is BellSouth's PR release on this.
r /26702.vtml
http://209.207.238.30/proactive/documents/rende
Now what are the odds that the trial will be in MY neighborhood? Probably slim.
There's no silver bullet but DWDM will help single fibres transmit 100s of Gbps.
Other useful technologies: massively parallel terabit routers, MPLS, and of course QOS-/ DiffServ to ensure bottleneck bandwidth gets used sensibly. Most local loops & routers will remain bottlenecks for some time - all IMO & I'm probably biased towards Diffserv, which Linux is rather good at in 2.2.
For those who want it straight from the source, check out BellSouth's web page.
New marketing slogan:
:)
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sorry.. had to say it.
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