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FTTP Changes Everything
06.15.05
By Lance Ulanoff
We are on the cusp of some fundamental and significant changes in broadband content delivery. Forget cable, say sayonara to DSL, and get ready for fiber to the premises (FTTP). In what could only be described as the biggest sneak attack in technology history, for the past half decade telephone companies have been quietly replacing that last mile of copper lines running to your home with superfast fiber-optic lines, essentially bridging the gap between homes and the fiber that's been running at street level for almost ten years.
I started hearing rumbles about fiber to the home years ago, but up until recently, it was all big promises and zero delivery. More recently, I learned of some pilot programs in Texas and Georgia, but nothing in my area. Then, a few weeks ago, two pieces of snail mail arrived on my doorstep—and, along with them, the potential for a whole new world of broadband opportunity. The first was a somewhat cryptic and startling letter from my local town official; startling because it painted my local cable company as having a monopolistic hold on cable services in my region (this is true, but why would a government official be saying that?); cryptic because it indicated that Verizon's "infrastructure" improvements were about to break that stranglehold. Normally in a situation like this, I would expect the town to play Switzerland and remain neutral on the whole issue. Not my town. It promised to work actively with Verizon and local government officials to make it possible for Verizon to provide "multichannel-television service." I read and reread the letter, scratching my head. "How would Verizon deliver television over our telephone lines when it had trouble delivering competitive broadband Internet access via DSL?" I wondered. Within a day I had my answer.
The second piece of snail mail, this one from Verizon, exhorted me to "See the Light." It was the telco's way of announcing the local availability of its new Fios Internet Service—in other words, FTTP service. The letter urged me to reserve my installation time and date now. The even better news was that my little neighborhood would be among the first, nationwide, to get access to this new, superfast service.
It may be difficult to comprehend my enthusiasm, so I want to be clear about something: When we consider FTTP as another broadband option alongside DSL and cable, we're not comparing apples to apples, or even apples to oranges. We're comparing the tortoise to the hare. Fiber has the potential to be not just a little faster than cable but hundreds of times faster. FTTP promises to transform online content delivery into the home. Let's look at the raw numbers:
Cable: 1 to 5 megabits per second (Mbps) for uploads and downloads
DSL: 1.5 Mbps for downloads and slower upload speeds (performance can even depend on distance from the telephone companies' central switch)
FTTP: Between 5 and 100 Mbps for downloads and 2 Mbps for uploads
With FTTP, downloads speeds are effectively limited only by what you're willing to pay. Verizon is offering me 5-Mbps downloads for $34.95 a month. For another $10, I can get 15-Mbps downloads. FTTP can go much higher, but Verizon isn't offering those options yet.
At 15 Mbps, a full-length movie from Movielink can download in a couple of minutes. And the pipe is large enough to stream the file without any noticeable loss in image quality.
I'm not sure what's suddenly transformed FTTP from a promise into a reality. It's as if the telephone companies finally woke up and realized they'd been sitting on their trump card all along. I recall that fiber's major stumbling block was maintaining signal strength over long distances, but repeaters have more or less solved that issue.
This seismic shift in the broadband landscape comes at a time of heated battles in the war to win the living room. Everyone wants to own a piece of the television set. There are now half a dozen set-top Internet TV delivery companies. Those using the Internet, like Dave TV and Akimbo, tend to download to hard drives and let you play back the content later. A handful have figured out how to deliver decent, full-screen video to television sets in real time (XTV, for example, does it, but delivers only porn). Cable companies are pushing video on demand and offer libraries of films and niche content that viewers can watch, pause, rewind, and so on whenever they want.
Still, there's no clear leader among all these choices. Consumers are often forced to choose a single pipe into the home (usually cable) that delivers television, Internet access, and even VoIP access. There are some discounts for using one provider for all the services, but it will still run you over $100 a month for everything. And as my own town government and I have made clear, most people have only one real choice for cable television delivery and the best broadband connection.
Verizon's ad, however, makes no mention of television service delivery to the home via Fios—cable or otherwise. Not that video is ignored. Amid the promises of superfast photo and music downloads and unfettered chat is this: "Even watch streaming video the way it was meant to be—smooth not choppy." "Video" can be files stored on a Web server somewhere around the globe, and it can also be what broadcast and cable TV stations currently deliver to your television set via the air and through your local cable service.
There are still hurdles, some beyond Verizon's control and others of its own making. For instance, delivering local and cable TV networks to consumers via FTTP will likely take the approval of not just the local government, but the federal government as well. I'm certain regional cable companies will lobby long and hard to stop that and will pull the FCC into endless hearings about FTTP's right to deliver the primary broadcast channels (remember the satellite TV battles of the late-to-mid 1990s?). In other words, they will not give up their monopolies without a fight.
Reading the Fios ad, I noticed a tiny asterisk next to the $34 and $44 monthly rates. The fine print at the bottom of the sheet revealed that these prices are good only if you buy the "qualifying Verizon calling package." This is the same game that local cable companies, like Cablevision, play with broadband services. Cable's Optimum Online costs $39 a month—as long as you also buy the Family cable plan. Otherwise, it jumps up another $10. I wish Verizon executives would realize that if they charged $20 less and did not require the adoption of the company's calling plan, they'd beat the pants off Cablevision and, most likely, still get people to sign up for Verizon calling. But with broadband and other cable companies offering VoIP calling services that regularly undercut telephone company prices, Verizon is in defensive mode. It has to tie one service to the other.
Verizon's pricing decision will, however, have no impact on FTTP adoption. One thing people understand is speed, and when they get wind of the experience that their neighbor is enjoying with Fios, they'll beat a path to Verizon's door (or anyone else offering FTTP). What happened with dial-up and cable will happen with cable and FTTP. And once that really fat pipe is in our homes, there's no telling what FTTP providers will be able to deliver to us and what cable companies will do to stay competitive. All we have to do is sit back and enjoy the fireworks.
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FTTP Changes Everything
06.15.05
By Lance Ulanoff
We are on the cusp of some fundamental and significant changes in broadband content delivery. Forget cable, say sayonara to DSL, and get ready for fiber to the premises (FTTP). In what could only be described as the biggest sneak attack in technology history, for the past half decade telephone companies have been quietly replacing that last mile of copper lines running to your home with superfast fiber-optic lines, essentially bridging the gap between homes and the fiber that's been running at street level for almost ten years.
I started hearing rumbles about fiber to the home years ago, but up until recently, it was all big promises and zero delivery. More recently, I learned of some pilot programs in Texas and Georgia, but nothing in my area. Then, a few weeks ago, two pieces of snail mail arrived on my doorstep—and, along with them, the potential for a whole new world of broadband opportunity. The first was a somewhat cryptic and startling letter from my local town official; startling because it painted my local cable company as having a monopolistic hold on cable services in my region (this is true, but why would a government official be saying that?); cryptic because it indicated that Verizon's "infrastructure" improvements were about to break that stranglehold. Normally in a situation like this, I would expect the town to play Switzerland and remain neutral on the whole issue. Not my town. It promised to work actively with Verizon and local government officials to make it possible for Verizon to provide "multichannel-television service." I read and reread the letter, scratching my head. "How would Verizon deliver television over our telephone lines when it had trouble delivering competitive broadband Internet access via DSL?" I wondered. Within a day I had my answer.
The second piece of snail mail, this one from Verizon, exhorted me to "See the Light." It was the telco's way of announcing the local availability of its new Fios Internet Service—in other words, FTTP service. The letter urged me to reserve my installation time and date now. The even better news was that my little neighborhood would be among the first, nationwide, to get access to this new, superfast service.
It may be difficult to comprehend my enthusiasm, so I want to be clear about something: When we consider FTTP as another broadband option alongside DSL and cable, we're not comparing apples to apples, or even apples to oranges. We're comparing the tortoise to the hare. Fiber has the potential to be not just a little faster than cable but hundreds of times faster. FTTP promises to transform online content delivery into the home. Let's look at the raw numbers:
Cable: 1 to 5 megabits per second (Mbps) for uploads and downloads
DSL: 1.5 Mbps for downloads and slower upload speeds (performance can even depend on distance from the telephone companies' central switch)
FTTP: Between 5 and 100 Mbps for downloads and 2 Mbps for uploads
With FTTP, downloads speeds are effectively limited only by what you're willing to pay. Verizon is offering me 5-Mbps downloads for $34.95 a month. For another $10, I can get 15-Mbps downloads. FTTP can go much higher, but Verizon isn't offering those options yet.
At 15 Mbps, a full-length movie from Movielink can download in a couple of minutes. And the pipe is large enough to stream the file without any noticeable loss in image quality.
I'm not sure what's suddenly transformed FTTP from a promise into a reality. It's as if the telephone companies finally woke up and realized they'd been sitting on their trump card all along. I recall that fiber's major stumbling block was maintaining signal strength over long distances, but repeaters have more or less solved that issue.
This seismic shift in the broadband landscape comes at a time of heated battles in the war to win the living room. Everyone wants to own a piece of the television set. There are now half a dozen set-top Internet TV delivery companies. Those using the Internet, like Dave TV and Akimbo, tend to download to hard drives and let you play back the content later. A handful have figured out how to deliver decent, full-screen video to television sets in real time (XTV, for example, does it, but delivers only porn). Cable companies are pushing video on demand and offer libraries of films and niche content that viewers can watch, pause, rewind, and so on whenever they want.
Still, there's no clear leader among all these choices. Consumers are often forced to choose a single pipe into the home (usually cable) that delivers television, Internet access, and even VoIP access. There are some discounts for using one provider for all the services, but it will still run you over $100 a month for everything. And as my own town government and I have made clear, most people have only one real choice for cable television delivery and the best broadband connection.
Verizon's ad, however, makes no mention of television service delivery to the home via Fios—cable or otherwise. Not that video is ignored. Amid the promises of superfast photo and music downloads and unfettered chat is this: "Even watch streaming video the way it was meant to be—smooth not choppy." "Video" can be files stored on a Web server somewhere around the globe, and it can also be what broadcast and cable TV stations currently deliver to your television set via the air and through your local cable service.
There are still hurdles, some beyond Verizon's control and others of its own making. For instance, delivering local and cable TV networks to consumers via FTTP will likely take the approval of not just the local government, but the federal government as well. I'm certain regional cable companies will lobby long and hard to stop that and will pull the FCC into endless hearings about FTTP's right to deliver the primary broadcast channels (remember the satellite TV battles of the late-to-mid 1990s?). In other words, they will not give up their monopolies without a fight.
Reading the Fios ad, I noticed a tiny asterisk next to the $34 and $44 monthly rates. The fine print at the bottom of the sheet revealed that these prices are good only if you buy the "qualifying Verizon calling package." This is the same game that local cable companies, like Cablevision, play with broadband services. Cable's Optimum Online costs $39 a month—as long as you also buy the Family cable plan. Otherwise, it jumps up another $10. I wish Verizon executives would realize that if they charged $20 less and did not require the adoption of the company's calling plan, they'd beat the pants off Cablevision and, most likely, still get people to sign up for Verizon calling. But with broadband and other cable companies offering VoIP calling services that regularly undercut telephone company prices, Verizon is in defensive mode. It has to tie one service to the other.
Verizon's pricing decision will, however, have no impact on FTTP adoption. One thing people understand is speed, and when they get wind of the experience that their neighbor is enjoying with Fios, they'll beat a path to Verizon's door (or anyone else offering FTTP). What happened with dial-up and cable will happen with cable and FTTP. And once that really fat pipe is in our homes, there's no telling what FTTP providers will be able to deliver to us and what cable companies will do to stay competitive. All we have to do is sit back and enjoy the fireworks.
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- for those speeds!!!! Someone get me into the pres office - me wants to complain