FTTH Con: Fiber show crowd looks east

The Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) Conference in Las Vegas this week has had a decidedly Asian bent to it, as attendees are taking notes from some of the world’s leading fiber authorities.

In this year’s second quarter, the number of ADSL users in Japan actually started to decline as consumers increasingly insisted on fiber. At the end of next year, the total number of FTTH users there is expected to surpass the number of ADSL users. Japanese carrier NTT expects to have 30 million FTTH subscribers by 2010, while Verizon expects to have less than 4 million by then.

NTT has also had success using cool applications to entice its FTTH users to upgrade to higher service tiers. The company attributes the popularity of its IP phone, hikari-denwa (which is not available to lower-tier users),

In the Korean city of Gwanju, the government is collaborating with service providers to deploy a new technology called TDMA-PON, a passive optical network based on time-division multiplexing. Though the technology has been rejected by NTT due to its incompatibility with that carrier’s network, Korea’s Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (which developed TDMA-PON and exhibited at the FTTH Conference) says it delivers 10 Gb/s to each home—about four times the speed of the gigabit PON deployed in the U.S.

FTTH also comes cheaper for Asian carriers. NTT will spend 350 million yen on FTTH next year, or nearly $3 million—a far cry from the billions Verizon spends annually on FTTH.

The high teledensity and technophilic cultures of Japan and Korea no doubt encourage FTTH deployment there. But Hiromichi Shinohara, director of NTT’s Access Network Service System Labs, told show attendees that competition is the company’s primary motivator. “Losing FTTH means losing everything, I think,” he said.