Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) Gains Traction

The major telephone firms are looking for ways to increase revenues through enhanced services while retaining their customer bases. One such way is through the delivery of ultra-high-speed internet access, combined with enhanced entertainment and telephone options, often by installing true fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) networks.

Under traditional telephone and internet service, homes are served by copper wires, which are limited to relatively slow service. However, old-fashioned copper networks are not up to the demands of today’s always-on internet consumers. Fiber-optic cable might be used in trunk lines to connect regions and cities to each other at the switch and network level, but speed drops significantly once the service hits local copper lines.

Things are much more advanced in major markets today. In an AT&T project, fiber is being brought into special hubs in existing neighborhoods. From those hubs, fast services are delivered into the home with advanced technologies on short, final runs of copper wire.

FTTH, in contrast, delivers fiber-optic cable all the way from the network to the local switch directly into the living room—with this system, internet delivery speeds and the types of entertainment and data delivered can be astounding. Google's “Google Fiber” service offers extremely fast download speeds of 1,000 Mbps (one gigabit), roughly 50 to 100 times faster than typical DSL or cable service. Recently, Google offered the service in cities including Atlanta, Georgia; Austin, Texas; Charlotte, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Kansas City, Kansas; Nashville, Tennessee; and Provo Utah, among others. This puts tremendous competitive pressure on other internet access companies. It also makes consumers wonder why they have been paying high monthly rates for slow service for many years. In response, AT&T has begun providing 1,000 Mbps service in several major cities. The long-term result is going to be much better, faster internet access in major U.S. cities, at a reasonable cost.

Verizon has completed a multi-year FTTH program that makes it a U.S. leader in FTTH. Verizon’s FTTH (called Fios) offers exceptional speeds up to 1 gigabit.

The Fiber-to-the-Home Council (www.ftthcouncil.org) tracks FTTH trends. In many cases, FTTH has been provided by local government or by subdivision developers who are determined to provide leading-edge connectivity as a value-added feature to new homes.

FTTH technologies, though expensive, may save the Bells from being trampled by the cable companies. Fiber-optic networks can give consumers extremely fast internet connections. Such ultra-high speeds will also allow consumers to download movies in seconds and make videoconferencing a meaningful reality for businesses. (Additional fiber terms used in the industry include FTTP for Fiber-to-the-premises and FTTO for fiber-to-the-office.)

FTTH has been widely adopted in South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, the United Arab Emirates and Taiwan, according to the FTTH Councils of Asia-Pacific, Europe and North America.

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