The worldwide FTTx market totaled $2,562 million in 2006, according to Gartner. And even though the AsiaPac region accounted for 40% of that pie, North America is still among the top regions in the world spending money on fiber.
Of course when you think of fiber in the U.S. you think of Verizon, but AT&T is spending its share of dough on fiber rollouts (primarily fiber to the node) as well. After gaining video franchise rights in South Carolina, AT&T announced earlier in the week that it plans to invest $250 million in that state alone on fiber network upgrades in the next several years.
Then there’s cable. Cable networks are built on hybrid fiber-coax networks, but more and more cable operators are considering deep fiber solutions as a way to stay competitive. I don’t have publishable numbers on this, but I do know that Motorola is seeing a serious up-tick in RFP discussions with cable operators on passive optical networking (PON) deployments. Greenfield locations in highly competitive regions are surely top priority, but with new solutions like Motorola’s Cable PON, even areas that are not highly competitive yet may be in the queue for fiber to the home (FTTH).
Filed under: AT&T, Bandwidth, Cable, Fiber, Networks, Verizon
[...] Given that bandwidth is limited, operators have three options: find ways to expand it (ex. lay fiber), make it work harder (ex. channel bonding) or control it (ex. traffic shaping). The cost/benefit [...]
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