OFC: Korea Telecom talks FTTP

In the first keynote address to the Optical Fiber Communication Conference, Korea Telecom president and CEO Yong-Kyung Lee touted South Korea’s accomplishments as the most wired country in the world while simultaneously expressing the need for greater bandwidth in access networks, prompting the South Korean carrier to plan fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) deployment.

South Korea’s broadband penetration is 73%, the highest in the world, Lee said. Of the 11 million broadband users there, more than 60% use DSL, and about 36% use cable broadband. That widespread availability of broadband has led to visible changes in the country’s culture, he added. The average broadband user connects to the Internet for more than 13 hours a week, a number that is rising as the average amount of weekly television viewing drops (to just over 14 hours a week at the end of 2002).

Online gaming is more than twice as popular as console gaming in South Korea, Lee said. In an entertaining display of the cultural shift wrought by widespread broadband, Lee showed a video clip of an online gaming championship tournament in his country, in which 50,000 screaming fans filled an auditorium to cheer on their online gaming heroes, batting together inflatable "rally sticks" like the fans of any other major sporting event.

But the most common applications for broadband in South Korea aren’t much different from those in the United States: Web-surfing, e-mail, online gaming and chat. For that, Lee blames the constraints of current network technology. And fiber is part of the remedy.

Lee wants to extend 100 Mb/s to every household: three channels of high-definition TV, 10 Mb/s of broadband, 4 Mb/s of interactive multimedia and the rest for virtual private networking and telecommuting. It will take some time. KT plans to begin a major FTTP deployment in 2006, delivering 50 Mb/s to 100 Mb/s of bandwidth to 73% of total households by the end of 2010.

To be cost-effective for wide-scale deployment, FTTP deployment costs must be lowered to less than 150% of the cost of DSL deployment, Lee said. Recent technological advancements are making FTTP deployment more affordable, but equipment costs still need to come down, he said. Currently, equipment accounts for 65% of the cost of FTTP deployment. That number should come down to 45%, he said, with labor accounting for 28% of the cost and cable and outside-plant hardware the other 27%.

KT is currently considering two basic technological paths for FTTP: wavelength-division multiplexing passive optical networks (WDM-based PON) and time-division multiple access (TDMA), each of which has advantages and trade-offs. WDM-based PON, Lee said, has nicer features but is more expensive.

KT has trialed fiber-to-the-curb deployments in Seoul with generally positive results but found that the quality of the service dropped off for customers who were more than 3 kilometers from the central office. Part of the benefit of that effort is the 50,000 km of fiber the carrier has already deployed in access networks, a number it expects to climb to 120,000 km by the end of 2007.

"Bringing fiber to the curb can make delivering fiber to the home easier," Lee said.