FTTH for cable companies

Sat Oct 19 17:51:09 UTC 2013

I think all of the MSOs in the US have long term (15-20 year) plans to
also do FTTH.  Advances in DOCSIS and coax technology seem to be outpacing
those available on the telco twisted-pair side, so it delays forklifting
the existing HFC plant. DOCSIS 3.1 requires some significant capital
investment to do things like expand upstream channel spectrum, etc. but
the costs still pale in comparison to trenching fiber to houses and will
give them enough bandwidth to supply a lot more users with higher speed
service.  There is also an evoluation to all-IP, everyone sees the writing
on the wall and many of the presentations at Cable-TEC (SCTE) in Atlanta
next week are focused on IP/IPTV, etc.  Like someone else said, it's hard
to replace millions of set-top boxes that don't speak IPTV... In a lot of
ways IPTV, etc. over a big IP pipe is much simpler than what we have today
even with RFoG.  But RFoG is compatible with all of the existing systems
in place.  

The are interesting ways to overlay PON on top of existing HFC deployments
that aren't really all that expensive, but houses aren't really being
built these days like they used to so the opportunities to build into new
developments isn't happening like it was 5-6 years ago.

As for Verizon, I think their choice to do the 1550 video wavelength had a
lot to do with how they were ingesting video in the beginning and the
back-end systems, customer premise equipment, etc.  It also doesn't
require doing things like QoS to separate Internet from video traffic.

Phil 

On 10/19/13 6:35 AM, "Jean-Francois Mezei" <jfmezei_nanog at vaxination.ca>
wrote:

>I need a reality check...
>
>For telcos, going from barely twisted copper pair to FTTH presents huge
>incremental improvement. FTTN is basically a stop gap medium term
>solution that is more pleasing to some beancounters.
>
>However, for a cable company, is there an advantage to deploy FTTH/GPON
>to bring light originally destined to the neighbourhood node all the way
>to the home and do away with coax ?
>
>From what I have read, cablecos limit FTTH deployments to greenfields.
>
>Do they save much by replaciung the "node" with a simple optical
>splitter which no longer limits how much upstream bandwidth is
>retransmitted back to head end ?
>
>Will there be a point in the next 10 years where cable companies might
>start to upgrade brownfields from coax to FTTH as some telcos have done ?
>
>While in Canada, FTTH deployment by telcos has been accompanied with
>IPTV deployments on the data path (single wavelength), I hear that
>Verizon has used twin wavelengths, on for GPON data, and one for RFoG
>for TV signals. Would it be fair to state that FIOS is basically
>identical to FTTH deployments by cable companies ?
>
>Do twin wavelength systems as deployed by Verizon end up costing far
>more ? Or is the price difference mininal ?
>
>Any information/insight appreciated.
>