[1st-mile-nm] Fwd: Verizon FiOS - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Steve Ross]

Yup on FiOS.

Look, I edit a magazine that LOVES fiber to the home. So I 
have a bias. But the word from Consumer's Union on FiOS 
specifically is "get it if you can... it is amazing."

Customers seem to like it... a lot. The churn is 1.5% a 
month -- basically, the rate at which people change 
addresses. Otherwise, they can't pry FiOS out of customers' 
hands.

This is the way it is for FTTH. More than 450 mainly rural 
providers (for the most part, small "tier 3 Incumbent Local 
Exchange Carriers" -- the phone companies) also offer FTTH, 
and their churn rate is lower in the aggregate than 
Verizon's -- apparently  because folks who live in rural 
areas don't move as often as the national average.

About 15 million homes can now get FTTH in the US, and more 
than 70% are served by Verizon. Verizon will have half its 
35-million-home footprint served by FiOS in another 18 months.

Verizon itself is so comfortable with the technology that it 
is quietly overbuilding AT&T U-Verse in Texas and Maryland. 
U-Verse is fiber to the node, which means the fiber ends on 
average 2500 feet from the subscriber and old copper takes 
over from there, using a souped-up variant of DSL called ADSL2+.

It may be the only reason to move to Plano, Texas. Imagine. 
AT&T, with a damn good service offering up to 10 Mbps, is in 
competition with a better service offering 50 Mbps down, 20 
Mbps up.... while most of New Mexico is "served" (in the 
sense a bull serves a cow down at the ranch) by Qwest.

To be fair, Verizon spends about $5 billion a year on FiOS 
expansion alone, and Qwest's entire market value is less 
than that.

The new fiber technologies, especially GPON and EPON for 
FTTH, are amazingly reliable, because the fiber is immune to 
lightning and electrical interference. In fact, the 
distribution hubs are for the most part entirely optical. 
There's no electricity at all in the distribution system -- 
just at the customer end and in the central office. The 
routers and switches are all pretty "smart," so they monitor 
themselves; quality of service is thus excellent.

All broadband network builders use "oversubscription." That 
is, the total backhaul bandwidth does not come close to the 
total bandwidth promised individual subscribers. But Verizon 
is evidently very conservative. If you signed up for 50 
Mbps, and you need it, it's there when you press your pedal 
to the metal.

This all contributes to low latency -- especially neat for 
gamers. so Verizon (it's evidently not your father's phone 
company) funds the "world championships" for gamers -- in 
Korea, where it has no customers -- to stimulate demand, 
because only FTTH can deliver the performance gamers need. 
So... you need a phone... with a dial... we have that in... 
black...

Large housing complexes -- MDUs -- can get FiOS through its 
"Verizon Enhanced Communities" program. Verizon basically 
invades a lackluster competitor's territory as a CLEC -- 
competitive local exchange carrier. It works when Verizon 
can latch on to a fiber interstate trunk nearby. This is a 
twist on an old business, that of the "private cable 
operator." So many large property owners are happy to play ball.

Some cities do it themselves, too. But cash flow has to be 
carefully planned or you end up like a carrier in 
Albuquerque did.

Otherwise, you need a forward-looking state that really 
cares about economic development (or a President with a 
national broadband plan... and it may happen... I'm up to my 
armpits in transition plans). Our latest studies on that are 
at www.bbpmag.com. There's also a 32-page "primer" there 
that explains this stuff in reasonably plain English. Or 
Spanish (we did it for South American telcos).

Once the fiber is laid, it is pretty much future proof. 
Instead of carrying one wavelength of light, off-the-shelf 
equipment now allows multiples, and the standard calls for 
1024. The new "10Gig" lasers up the throughput by 4 times 
more per wavelength by pulsing faster. Acoustically-linked 
optical circular polarization (already used in some 
equipment, but not for communications) gives each wavelength 
a thousand-fold increase.

So swap out some electronics at the central office and each 
single plain fiber laid today will be able to carry 4 
million fibers' worth of traffic down the road. That's about 
500 exabytes per second ON A SINGLE FIBER. Total world 
traffic today is about 500 exabytes a YEAR.

Copper... is so... last-century.



Steven S. Ross
Editor-in-Chief
Broadband Properties
steve at broadbandproperties.com
www.bbpmag.com
SKYPE: editorsteve
+1 781-284-8810
+1 646-216-8030 fax
+1 201-456-5933 mobile

Tom Johnson wrote:
> Steve:
> You have experience with FiOS, don't you? 
> 
> -tom
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: *Owen Densmore* <owen at backspaces.net <mailto:owen at backspaces.net>>
> Date: Jan 13, 2009 4:18 PM
> Subject: [1st-mile-nm] Verizon FiOS - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
> To: 1st-Mile-NM <1st-mile-nm at mailman.dcn.org 
> <mailto:1st-mile-nm at mailman.dcn.org>>, The Friday Morning Applied 
> Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
> 
> I was probing around for internet tv services (I'm considering
> dropping cable/sat/.. and moving to AppleTV + "home theater" or
> similar .. i.e. "internet tv") and happened across a NFL football site
> that offers HD service through something called FiOS .. which I hadn't
> seen before.
> 
> Apparently there's a very nifty broadband service evolving:
>    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fios
> Here's an older survey on it:
>    http://tinyurl.com/8m4mgx
> One interesting statement they make is: The results are clear. If
> speed is what you're after, go with FiOS first, cable second and DSL
> last.  (I'd be suspicious of the DSL/Cable difference, given the
> shared nature of cable.)
> 
> Has anyone tried FiOS?  Unfortunately it is not available in Santa
> Fe .. we're a bit third world, alas.  But maybe it'll get here some
> time and I'd like to know if your experiences are good.
> 
>      -- Owen
> 
> 
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> 
> -- 
> ==========================================
> J. T. Johnson
> Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
> www.analyticjournalism.com <http://www.analyticjournalism.com>
> 505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
> http://www.jtjohnson.com                 tom at jtjohnson.com 
> <mailto:tom at jtjohnson.com>
> 
> "You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
> To change something, build a new model that makes the
> existing model obsolete."
> -- Buckminster Fuller
> ==========================================