| Very Nice Article From Ars: Fiber to the home is associated with Verizon, but half of the rural telcos around the country are installing it, too, a few hundred lines at a time. The strange result: Bemidji, MN gets fiber but Chicago does not.
While Verizon gets most of the US press for its FTTH FiOS rollout, small operators like Paul Bunyan have quietly been laying fiber of their own for years. According to quarterly trade journal FTTH Prism, half of all rural telcos are now deploying fiber of some kind, and many are choosing to run it all the way to customer homes.
Bunyan has currently wired 30 percent of users in its 4,500 mile service territory with fiber connections that can offer up to 40Mbps symmetric connections. The goal is to make the entire network, even the truly rural bits, fiber-only within the next decade. Once that's done, advances in backoffice gear like multiplexers should ensure a (relatively) inexpensive upgrade path.
So...what was that about rural fiber being too expensive? If these small operators can do it, then surely the giant, *giant* incumbents with HUGE profit margins and ENORMOUS bank accounts could do even better. |
