Fiber optic confusion

It’s clear that there is still uncertainty among telecom service providers when it comes to what form of fiber optic access network makes the most sense--fiber to the premises, fiber to the curb or fiber to the node.

The feeling was palpable yesterday at Telephony’s IPTV Workshop, being held in Boston as part of Fall 2006 VON, which is now voice, video and vision on the network.

Nicola Palmer, vice president of video networks services at Verizon, started the day off with a confident restatement of her company’s belief that its FiOS FTTP buildout is providing a sustainable advantage for its IPTV (and RF) video services because of its greater bandwidth capacity.

“We have room to grow and ways to enhance our services, and one of those enhancements is IPTV,” she said, in an opening keynote address. Already those enhancements include one-button “widgets” that provide “hyper-local” information on weather and traffic down to the ZIP code as well as multiroom digital video recorder and media manager services. The latter enables customers to stream digital photos and music from a PC onto a FiOS TV screen within the home.

But later, after BellSouth’s Peter Hill, vice president of technology planning and deployment, walked through the FTTN and FTTC options, a broader panel of industry experts was bombarded with questions that all fell along the same lines. How do you know if you have enough bandwidth? What’s the greater risk, taking longer to build out an all-fiber network or building a near-term fiber-rich network that doesn’t go all the way into the home?

“This is a multi-decade strategy,” said Prem Tirilok, director of IPTV strategy at Tellabs, which supplies FTTP gear to Verizon. Service providers that put a near-term solution in place could well be faced with major costly upgrades before they’ve had a chance to earn a return on their initial investment, he said.

Hill said it may be too early to reach any definite conclusion.

“We are in a period of experimentation,” he said. “We have to see the results in the marketplace. We will be learning a lot over the next two years.”

Verizon’s FTTP approach will hit 3 million homes a year, he said, but leaves millions more unconnected.

Certainly, the FTTN strategy is faster and cheaper--about $800 per home served versus $1500 for FTTP, said Linda Starr, senior analyst with Frost & Sullivan.

But it was also clear for the 150-plus attendees today that, while it’s certain telecom service providers must compete with cable and do so immediately, it’s much less certain which network approach will serve them well in doing so.