Broadband Agnostics

Broadband is all the rage these days. Seems like you can’t discuss any kind of electronics gear –phones, computers, or flat screen TVs -- without mentioning high-speed broadband connections.

We live in the Internet Age. The Internet functions best with broadband.

By way of clarification, broadband generally connotes connections at megabit per second speeds. Until recently, the Federal Communications Commission defined broadband to be any connection at 200 kilobits per second or higher. That’s not very broad at all. So, the FCC is tightening the criteria to better reflect the realities of the Internet Age.

That said, broadband is everywhere, or will soon be. At least, that’s the hope. At end-2Q08, our tally shows that broadband penetration in the U.S. reached just 24% of all customers’ wireline and wireless connections. Still a long way to go!

From a wired perspective, broadband is an alphabet soup of offerings. Local exchange carriers are putting in FTTN, FTTP a la BPON and GPON, and CO- and remote-fed DSL. The cable guys are pitching cable modems, DOCSIS and RFoG. The power utilities are getting into the act with BPL.

All these technologies have their pros and cons. Actually, they all have issues!

FTTP proponents claim to deliver more bandwidth, up to 100 Mb/s, over an all-fiber network. Meanwhile, the FTTN crowd touts IPTV that streams HDTV channels so you don’t need as much bandwidth as FTTP’s broadcast model. Plus, the FTTN crowd claims lower capex and faster time-to-market by reusing existing copper wires from the node to the home.