While many in the industry look to fiber and 3G/4G to replace the outside plant infrastructure that has kept people connected for the past 130 years or so, copper isn't being replaced at quite the same rate one might think.
This article is part of the V2M Digital Issue, Better Broadband. Download your free PDF edition of the magazine here.
Vertical Systems Group says that business fiber penetration has risen to just 27.7 percent in the U.S. and 18.4 percent in Europe. Meanwhile, Heavy Reading said over 32 million households will be connected to FTTH or FTTB at the end of 2015 in Europe and North Amercia; this is about 11 percent of all homes in the region. In the EU only, the total will touch 19 million, or 10 percent of all homes.
Also, when it comes to special access and backhaul, while fiber is nice to have, it's still woefully scarce. And that's a problem as backhaul requirements continue to explode for mobile data and video applications.
So, business services are questing for Ethernet (which is best delivered over fiber), and consumers like the FTTx-delivered services in the connected home, but the reality is that the majority of homes and businesses remain connected with plain old copper, and will continue to be so for some time to come, considering that building out fiber tends to be an expensive proposition.
Meanwhile, over-the-top (OTT) video is set to drive a more than 50 percent increase in bandwidth utilization per household between 2010 and 2015 according to IMS Research, which will necessitate new network strategies by telcos — and we’re not talking about fiber. Recent findings on the IPTV world market indicate that 75 percent of IPTV households receive television over an ADSL connection — and future-proofing with fiber-to-the-home infrastructure is prohibitively expensive, not to mention time-intensive.
The problem, of course, is that copper is lossy, and the further the DSLAM is located from the end location, the slower the bandwidth speeds, as everyone knows. So what's an operator to do, when faced with a growing thirst from customers for uber-broadband service and nothing but a ancient wire to deliver them? Innovate, of course.
Telcos are seeking cost-effective solutions to maximize their legacy infrastructure. Reducing crosstalk across copper bonded pairs using the ITU-T G.vector standard (G.993.5), introducing software solutions to maximize network logistics and using caching in the network are all solutions that are occurring right now, as telcos position themselves to meet the rapidly growing consumer OTT demand.
