The future of high-speed broadband access is already lined up
posted by Jerome Joanny
Director of Product Management, ASSIA Inc
March 15th, 2011
When it comes to achieving next-generation broadband speeds, mainstream opinion seems to focus on fiber to the home (FTTH) as the Holy Grail of the future. While there’s no denying that FTTH can offer amazing speeds, the potential of high speeds over existing copper lines—and the advantages—should not be overlooked.
Many service providers have already done the math and realized that, with the exception perhaps of green-field neighborhoods and other new developments, FTTH usually doesn’t make sense economically. Furthermore, customers only care about getting the speeds they need, not the underlying technology that delivers it.
The advantages of delivering high speeds over existing copper lines are myriad. In the overwhelming majority of communities, copper wire lines are already in place, so service providers can leverage existing investments and infrastructure. Copper also delivers dedicated bandwidth to the subscriber—a colossal advantage over a channel shared by many subscribers.
More importantly, advances in today’s DSL technology are already making fiber-like speeds possible over short distances. Based on technology pioneered by ASSIA, several DSL equipment vendors have demonstrated speeds approaching 1 Gbps to customers on 300 to 500 meters, without any sharing of data rate, on a few twisted-pairs to the home. That’s somewhat better than a recent example in the New York Times of a service provider in Hong Kong offering a very affordable gig over FTTH, but whose customers likely are sharing the bandwidth
Clearly, there’s still work to do both for the future of fiber and copper. However, the smart future for service providers faced with balancing budgets over the next five to ten years may well be a robust hybrid solution where fiber is run as close to subscribers as possible, and copper concludes the last 100 to 500 meters or so to the home. This is also known as fiber to the cabinet (FTTC), fiber to the kerb (FTTK) or fiber to the basement (FTTB).
When actively managing their DSL networks with Dynamic Spectrum Management (DSM) solutions, service providers not only can offer high speeds while taking advantage of existing resources, but they also can pro-actively plan a smooth and cost-effective fiber deployment where and when it makes sense.
In addition, DSM helps ensure that both existing and new investments are future proofed as technologies such as vectoring (expected to reach the market in the near future) push the speed envelope even further, truly delivering fiber-like performances over copper. As worldwide reliance and demand for broadband services continue to rise at incredible rates, important technological innovations that use what we already have in place can play an important role in connecting people and businesses through affordable, ubiquitous, high-speed Internet access.