BROADBAND COMMUNITIES is the leading source of information on digital and broadband technologies for buildings and communities. Our editorial aims to accelerate the deployment of Fiber-To-The-Home and Fiber-To-The-Premises.
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SERVICE PROVIDER STRATEGIES Rethinking the Access Network Access to the Internet of the future will require lots of bandwidth – and that means fber. By Kevin McClain / Allied Telesis T elecom service providers need to fnd new applications for residential wireline networks. Plain old telephone service (POTS) continues to decline. Te generation now entering the housing market was raised on cellphones, so the trend is unlikely to change. Although the drop in the number of home phone lines has been ofset by the very successful deployment of high-speed Internet (HSI), entry into the video business has not been as successful as promised. Te ever rising costs of content, changes in technology and very strong competition have made growing profts with IPTV difcult, even in a 25-year model. Don't get me wrong – the decision to enter the IPTV market was solid in many cases, and some companies have done fne with this ofering. Te problem with IPTV today is that it is deployed as "broadcast" video, which was designed for cable networks, not telecom networks. It is time for local exchange carriers to embrace a new model and migrate their video oferings. pAST AND fUTURE Back in the 1970s, the cable companies bet big on customers' willingness to pay for something they already got for free – TV. Picture quality, content and choice, coupled with a more efcient way to monetize TV advertising, made companies such as Comcast and Time Warner Cable the giants they are today. Te result was the hybrid fber-coax (HFC) architecture delivering broadcast video. As time went on, the satellite companies entered the market, and the cable companies added lowcost services such as HSI and voice, generating even higher profts. Meanwhile, the LECs had 76 | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | www.broadbandcommunities.com to add a high-cost broadcast service to compete with the triple-play model. In the last 15 years, the outside plant went from not having enough copper pairs to amassing an ever rising number of unused pairs. Fast forward 15 years into the future, and those copper pairs will have decayed. Te choices will be to replace the copper, install fber or go wireless. Te decision depends largely on what the applications of the future will require. I believe new applications will run on a new service called "ultra-high-speed Internet" (UHSI), which will be 100 times faster than today's average HSI ofering. Is that overkill? Will it be too expensive? I am sure the cable companies asked the same thing when they rolled out their frst 60-channel analog systems. Over the last 15 years, residential Internet speeds have gone from 56 Kbps to 5 Mbps per household on average. Tat's a 100-fold increase in speed. Premium Internet services, although not always available, are reaching 10 Mbps. If the same gains occur in another 15 years, the average speed should be around 500 Mbps with premium service at around a gigabit per second – but considering that gigabit speeds are already available in some 50 communities nationwide, this doesn't seem out of the question. fIRST ApplICATION fOR UHSI Te most obvious application to run on a UHSI platform is TV. However, unlike the present version of TV, next-generation TV will have no quality limitations, be more bidirectional and be based almost entirely on unicast. Broadcast TV today is bound by a channel lineup. It | July 2013