FTTH for cable companies

Sat Oct 19 10:35:47 UTC 2013

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.