[LINK] Considering Fibre to the Home

[Adrian Chadd]

On Mon, May 07, 2007, George Bray wrote:
> It's good to see the call for opening up the analysis of Australia's
> future broadband network.
> 
> <http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,21682412%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html>
> 
> I think the whole debate could benefit from wider scrutiny and
> claim/cost verification.

My 2c,

FTTH can be useful for a variety of services. Those include, but not limited to:

* multimedia access (think traditional TV, IPTV, subscription TV,
  collaborative type projects, etc.) and this is where the money's probably
  going to be made
* general internet access, and this is where people tend to complain..

Now, I keep seeing FTTH! FTTH! pop up in relation to internet access but
people go very quiet when I ask what infrastructure will be in place to
provide connectivity from the FTTH network to the general "internet".
Will the networks be engineered to handle the ghastly proportion of IP
traffic (think P2P, regardless of legitimacy) or .. heck, will we just
be in the same position at the moment where international bandwidth costs
three figures a megabit?

(Not saying having the infrastructure to the home wouldn't be nice - god
I'd love it - but I'd really like to see something sustainable, and not
the current Australian yo-yo between "unlimited!" and "oh crap, unlimited
isn't what we _MEANT_..")

In summary, I think part of a FTTH buildout should really involve investigating
ways to keep content local, or we'll have a mightily fast pipe to home
with a 10 gigabyte cap on it - and at that stage I'll stick to ADSL2, thanks.




Adrian