With the recent cross-industry push to deliver high-speed data over standard phone lines, the plan to run fiber-optic lines into the home looked dead.
Not so fast.
Southeastern telco BellSouth (BLS) said yesterday it would collaborate with Japanese telecom giant Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) to develop a specification for bringing fiber to the home. Both companies plan limited deployment of the technology within a year.
"Everybody's watching the trends, and they indicated that by 2001, the cost of fiber-to-the-home will have reached the point where we can afford to do it," said John Goldman, BellSouth communications manager. "But if standards [such as those NTT and BellSouth are seeking] are accepted, who knows -- it might even beat those dates."
In contrast to ADSL copper-based technology, the bandwidth available in fiber-to-the-home connections, Goldman said, is dependendent not on the technology but on customer requirements.
"The thing about fiber is that there's practically unlimited speed and capacity available," he said. "Essentially, you're attaching a big pipe to the side of the house. Then the customer takes whatever he needs. It's almost self-provisioning." Gigabyte speeds are easily possible over fiber, while "substantially lower high-end speeds exist for copper," Goldman said.
BellSouth said the announcement represents the first major push for fiber-to-the-home technology in years. The companies believe the capacity of fiber is a key to bringing future data, imaging, and video applications to fruition.
The two companies signed a research and development deal that will pool an effort they hope leads to affordable implementation. Their combined resources and customer base will drive down equipment costs and speed availability in the marketplace, the companies said.
They expect to deliver the results of their collaboration to the Full Service Access Network (FSAN) initiative as a proposed fiber-to-the-home standard. Goldman said he believed that could happen within a year or less. Perhaps within a matter of months.
FSAN is a consortium of 14 international telecom companies seeking broadband access specifications. FSAN members include Bell Canada, British Telecom, France Telecom, GTE, Korea Telecom, NTT, SBC, Swisscom, and Telecom Italia.
The company's plans for fiber installations in no way preempts BellSouth's involvement in the Universal ADSL Working Group, Goldman said. That group is pushing for a common standard to deliver high-speed data via standard phone lines.
"ADSL and fiber-to-the-home are all going on at the same time," he said. The company sees both technologies as "different arrows in our quiver." Goldman added that BellSouth has even purchased cable infrastructure, and plans on deploying some of its high-speed data services over these coaxial lines in some areas.
From FSAN, Goldman said, the NTT-BellSouth specification would proceed to the International Telecommunications Union to begin the standards process.
Citing recent advances and cost reductions for fiber, BellSouth said interest in optical distribution networks "with Asynchronous Transfer Mode Passive Optical Networks," called ATM-PON, is increasing.
The company sees this fiber flavor emerging as the most promising technology for large-scale fiber networks. The technology's "passive optical splitters" are attractive to telcos because they don't require the company to provide power to the splitter. The power can be supplied by household electricity at the customer end.
Asked whether a new push for fiber-to-the-home couldn't derail ADSL momentum, Goldman said he didn't think it would. "They're complementary. You're going to deploy fiber where you can economically afford to do it, and that's going to be new construction."
BellSouth, he said, will roll out fiber equipment based on the new specification, primarily in new home developments and in the replacement of aerial cables. Aerial cables, in contrast to those buried below ground, are the cables running along telephone poles.
BellSouth has already been deploying fiber to the curb for a number of years, Goldman said, as has NTT in Japan. The company is likely to make an initial deployment of fiber to new home developments in the Atlanta metropolitan area, Goldman said.
NTT has experience to lend BellSouth in the area of replacing aerial copper cable with fiber, Goldman added, which would let the telco install fiber without digging up copper.
