re: PON: The Dream Is AliveCouple things to be clear about.
1 - If the RBOCs have to unbundle PON, it will NEVER happen.
2 - The State PUCs will not allow mass RBOC deployment until PON costs are at or very near copper costs. The cable costs the same, the equipment does not.
PON has many years to go to becoming a mainstream technology. You can assume all of these startups will go bust before it does.
re: PON: The Dream Is AliveDo some research and look at the price of deploying a FTTH system today compared to HFC. Copper can't compete as far as bandwidth is concerned, and the gap is closing as far as price
re: PON: The Dream Is AliveDo some research and look at the price of deploying an FTTH system today compared to HFC. ___________________________________________
What's the price for a cable company to extend their HFC to the home? (I assume they would use the cheapest fiber technology as well) What are the barriers (regulatory or economic) to them doing this?
re: PON: The Dream Is AliveThe idea of PON maybe a leading option today for FTTH, but it is hardly mainstream. This goes back to some relevant discussion about a month ago on the Worldwide Packet article. The barriers are not just about standards becoming finalized. It has to do with : - when the phone guys and cable guys decide they can coexist in one same infrastructure so to benefit from fiber and the idea of true integrated service network, which will not happen any time soon - RBOCs digging up your lawn to replace the copper (in a massive scale), which is not likely to happen. By the time that happens, someone may have figured out how to squeeze a lot more out of copper, stretch the distance, etc. Even if YOU let the guys dig up your lawn, your neighbors may not, nor your city municipality, nor PUC... Bureaucracy, is it not? So don't expect FTTH/PON to be at your home in your life time, unless you move to a new neighborhood where you know will have it. It's not just a cost and disruption issue on the RBOC/CATV's side. New housing communities are the only logical place for this. And it has to be done in a grand scale in order to benefit from the economy of scale. Digging up copper or hanging new fiber on utility poles aren't going to do it. - Community and home builders also are not necessarily comfortable about having only fiber in the ground. Maybe some. In the end there's still your copper and HFC. - In the example of RBOC, they'll still offer you whatever version of DSL over fiber at similar bandwidth, (who knows maybe still cap you at 128k upstream...) incremental improvement in coverage because of the above issues. So they make the bucks and everyone else still suffer. Despite the economy, new bandwidth-hogging services will continue to emerge, and what you get may still not be fast enough. Will they ever get it?
So rather than PON being mainstream any time soon, perhaps the business and technology model and strategy for anything-over-fiber have to be different but more basic?
Is it O.K. to remove the plug yet?