Subject: [LINK] Considering Fibre to the Home

Stewart Fist stewart_fist at optusnet.com.au
Tue May 8 18:15:01 AEST 2007


George asks:
> 
> My question to the Link Institute is whether Australia should be also
> be considering the costs of an eventual fibre to the home network that
> extends any fibre to the node development. If we are looking further
> to the future, I think we should consider the eventual replacement of
> the copper last mile now and how this might affect this next
> investment and rollout.
> 
> Have any recent costings on a long term migration to FTTH been done?
> If we are to spend $5-10b now, will that investment be wasted when we
> come to the next upgrade. It would be excellent to have a 25 year plan
> that took into account the current rusty copper, the intermediate FTTN
> plans and where we really want to be compared with other emerging
> broadband economies.


Fiber to the node will bring down a couple of fibres to a node within 100
meters from your home. (Some will be redundant)

Each fibre pair will probably service 20 homes.

With with the right terminal equipment (not currently used for FTTH or
FTTC), the cable owner can then provide about 1 Gigabit-per-sec to each of
these homes from the local exchange if it is ever needed -- which is enough
bandwidth for about 50 HDTV images with surround sound.

But currently that sort of terminal equipment is expensive, while the fibre
is relatively cheap.

Initially the provider will link the last 100 metres to the homes with
copper using one of the species of DSL.  But there's no reason why later,
when high-speed optical terminal equipment become cheaper, they can't pull
the copper and replace it with fibre to complete the to-home circuit from
the local node.  

The point is that Fibre-to-the-Curb will provide a long-term solution in the
cable which won't need to be replaced to be upgraded. You don't need to
replace the fibre, but you will change the terminal equipment.

Jumping straight into fibre-to-the-home would certainly be great, but it
would be at a cost that Australia probably can't currently afford.  And
anyway, we would probably still need to upgrade the terminal equipment at a
later stage when we get a couple of HDTV sets in a few bedrooms.

So it makes sense for Australia to go with FTTC and wait for the next
upgrade stage, before we take fibre over the last 100 yards. We can then get
the lower costs and better systems when prices drop after the USA, Asia and
Europe get into full production.

Upgrading the last-100 can also be done progressively-on-demand if you use
FTTC-nodes as an interim stage. Not everyone needs (or wants) to swap over
to FTTH at the same time.  It is best done in stages.


So Fibre to the home with say, 40Gbps of bandwidth, is probably the final
stage.  All technologies have a limit (not necessarily technical) in terms
of social or cultural requirements.

We have a four-lane bitumen road dowm the streets (two of which are used for
parking) and have had these four for nearly a century.  I see no reason to
want it upgraded to 6 lanes.  Nor do I need bigger water pipes, or more than
250 volts of electric current.

I'm not an infinite-extrapolist, so my guess is that no home in Australia
will need more than a gigabit-per-sec of bandwidth, even in the life-time of
your grand-child's grand-child.


Personally, I hope they keep the old 'rusty copper' in place, since it can
be used to provide DC feeds, and is ideal for security systems.


-- 
Stewart Fist, writer, journalist, film-maker
70 Middle Harbour Road, LINDFIELD, 2070, NSW, Australia
Ph +61 (2) 9416 7458




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