 gwionwild colonial boyPremium,ExMod 2001-08
join:2000-12-28
Pittsburgh, PA
kudos:1 | There's one other thing badly misunderstood ... FTTP is not an internet service, it's not a new tier, it's not anything except complete replacement of an obsolete carrier medium, in the form of copper. It comes to bury copper, not to supplement it.
In the long run... a decade or so down the road... Verizon won't have a copper outside plant... period. Nor will any of the other telcos, eventually. This is something I keep trying to hammer, somewhat unmercifully, in the FIOS forum - not to tout or criticize it. Just to clarify the basic fact, that fiber optical systems aren't a service. They're a naked carrier medium, entirely service-agnostic. The service they happen to plan on providing is POTS and ISP services, eventually television, and who knows what, down the road.
They're also extensive and unbelievably labor and cost intensive to deploy. These networks aren't achieved by switching out some old equipment, adding some new equipment, and selectively re-cabling areas with deteriorated copper... these networks involve a complete refit, a new inside plant at the CO, and a ground up rebuild of every foot of cable and every item in outside plant in the CO's service area.
No, there's no way back... and, in the end game... and fiber, clearly understand, is an end game, not an evolutionary or interim phase in current communications technology, like DSL was... when this decade long strategic plan is finally wrapped up, nobody will have copper... it will cease being an option. As I'm fond of saying in the FIOS forum, it's not an "internet technology", and mistaking it for one is misunderstanding the purpose of fib-op, entirely. Fib-op is, again, a naked carrier medium. It's the state of the art in communications carrier media, and it will replace copper for everything... even if you don't want high speed internet, you'll eventually have fiber for POTS. Indeed, it's a matter of the telcos looking out for their best interests, no doubt. Copper is highly limited, maintenance intensive, susceptible to lots of QoS issues. It's essentially becoming obsolete in the face of modern QoS needs and capacity demands. A future-proof network, today, has to be fiber optical. It would probably be being deployed, perhaps not as aggressively or quickly, even if high speed internet didn't exist. The core systems of most telcos... the main line trunks... have been fiber optical for over a decade, now, in most areas. It's the neighborhoods and the last mile that's lagged. Fiber's the end game, not a tactical move...
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Semper Eadem
I can saw a woman in two
But you won't want to look in the box when I do
I can make love disappear
For my next trick, I'll need a volunteer |
