The Fiber to the Home conference took place this week in Orlando so there’s been a wave of fiber news and statistics. From the Fiber to the Home Council comes a study stating that more than two million American homes now have a fiber connection. While that’s under two percent of homes in the country, it’s still a fairly impressive number, made more so by the fact that two-thirds of those connections come via Verizon, which has only been deploying FTTH for the last few years.
The question is: how will that number change in the next few years? Not just from further Verizon deployments, but also from AT&Ts FTTH initiatives and cable FTTH deployments? For now the FTTH focus for most operators is in greenfield situations, but that may change as providers look beyond the requirements of the next few years to what their networks will have to support a decade or two from now.
I have fiber right now from an independent firm in San Francisco and it’s pretty freaking amazing. I don’t have any TV features, but I can imagine the possibilities. I can download a two hour movie in about 4 and a half minutes from a dedicated server. In a few more months, I will have to downgrade back to Comcast and am dreading going back to basic broadband.
Having said that, I’ve gotten it into my head that Verizon will ultimately control the US because they are the only ones that can really offer this kind of experience. Do you think that I’m putting too much weight on the appeal of fiber for consumers and on the inadequacy of AT&T’s Fiber to the node strategy or will AT&T be able to offer just as compelling of an internet and TV solution? Without seeing a demonstration of both in action, it’s hard to really know how important pure fiber is, but I can definitely understand why consumers are switching.
Davis- I do think fiber is ultimately critical, but I also think there are a number of ways to extend bandwidth in the short term. I read recently that Time Warner for instance is introducing a 20 Mbps speed tier in New York. TW doesn’t need fiber to do that, and most consumers aren’t even looking for that level of speed yet. (though they will be soon) Operators can make the most of their HFC and copper infrastructure now, while gradually deploying fiber deeper into their networks.
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[...] The FTTH Council also put out its latest research last week ranking countries worldwide on FTTH penetration. The US skipped up three steps to number eight from number eleven, mainly because of Verizon. [...]