The Fiber-to-the-Home Council forecast late last year that fiber installations will soar by 330 percent next year, from 72,100 homes passed to 315,000 homes passed, and will reaching between 800,000 and 1.4 million homes by 2004. Many of those networks are being built by municipalities, developers and other entities, rather than the phone companies.
That's notable because, as Larry Johnson, president of fiber optic training company the Light Brigade, says, time to market is important. "Once you get fiber in, no one can compete," he says.
While BellSouth Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc. quietly are doing installations of fiber to the home (FTTH), Johnson says municipalities, developers, independent carriers and utilities are pushing ahead on FTTH. He notes Palo Alto, which houses the Palo Alto Research Center and Stanford University, got tired of waiting for the RBOC to install the big bandwidth the city needed, so the city contracted third parties to build the network. And, Chelan County, Wash., placed fiber to homes and is allowing third parties to offer services over that fiber, he says.
The arrival of passive optical network technology, which British Telecom plc pioneered and which borrows technology from coarse and dense wave division multiplexing (DWWM), is now helping FTTH become reality, says Johnson. "What PON did is, it took the best of the splitter technology, the best of WDM technology, and it took into consideration that one-to-one fiber from the CO to the home wouldn't work and power wouldn't work, so that made it much more effective," he says. "We use a very high perform-ance laser downstream, which is what DWDM uses. The laser at the home is outside, so there's a need for that to be low cost and effective." Long the Holy Grail of the residential local loop, FTTH systems typically deliver about 622mbps downstream and 155mbps upstream, he adds.
As for the FTTH Council's study, it found about one percent of new homes built in the United States over the last six months were wired with fiber to the home. The results were based on more than 600 interviews with industry experts, a census of current FTTH projects and random samples of key fiber markets, says the FTTH Council. "This study clearly shows that fiber is the broadband technology of the 21st century and that the number of homes with fiber installed will reach a critical mass within a few short years," says James Salter, president of the FTTH Council.
The projections are relatively consistent with data from market research firm KMI Research, which a year ago predicted fiber would pass 860,000 homes by 2004. "The early numbers that we had expected have been a little bit hurt by the economy [but] not as much as in other areas of telecom," says Geoff Wilbur, a KMI Research analyst. One reason: The independent rural telephone companies, municipalities and construction companies building FTTH are less susceptible to the telecom crash than the CLECs that buckled under heavy debt and stiff competition.
Analysts predict construction of FTTH will explode once the Bell operators overlay their networks in a significant way with high-speed capacity, a move KMI anticipates in the 2005-06 timeframe. But "they are not going to move until they feel the heat," Wilbur says.
