HOME FIBERS BURNING

It's getting there. That fiber you've been hearing so much about. It has just crawled up the curb, over the lawn, and now - can you believe it - it has reached the house. Fiber to the home, a technology once considered too expensive to deploy, is slowly becoming an affordable reality.

"We can terminate fiber to the home today and provide a complete bundle of services over it," says Asim Saber, CEO of Optical Solutions, a vendor based in Minneapolis. "The cat's meow is that we can provide it at the same pricing as DSL."

Optical Solutions' FiberPath system provides fiber to or near the home over a passive optical network. To each residential customer, the system can provide as many as six POTS lines, 130 video channels and high-speed data with 10 Mb/s downstream and 2.5 Mb/s upstream. "What's most important is we can put this passive optical network in today, and we have a migration path for when market demand increases," Saber says. "We're ready for the future all-digital network."

A "passive" network means that no active electronics are used in the field - simply fiber and fiber optic splitters, which can divide each transmission into signals to 32 homes. This should mean higher reliability and lower maintenance than with hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) or a digital loop carrier, says Bob Lund, chief technology officer of Optical Solutions. "It's pretty stable - it's not affected by the environment," he says. "It also can evolve, so once an operator puts it in, they are able to add new services."

In June, the company announced that both Futureway Communications, a Canadian service provider, and Rye Telephone, a carrier based in Colorado City, Colo., had signed on to bring FiberPath to residential customers. Futureway committed to deploying 20,000 units of the product. Rye will deploy the service on Hatchet Ranch, a 20,000 acre community with 500 lots.

Lund says the technology could be equally applicable for cable companies. "The equipment can go in a [central office] or a headend and then can attach inside or outside the home," he says.

The box that attaches to the home is called a universal demarcation point (UDP), a patented product of Optical Solutions. For fiber-near-the-home service, the UDP is placed within 500 feet of the customer. FiberPath is affordable for customers because of the bundle factor, Lund explains. "If you add all the services together that people are receiving separately now, the pricing isn't much different," he says. "There are no expensive electronics in the home because we translate the signals according to how they are used."

This means Optical Solutions won't offer digital transmission for video until digital televisions are more widely used. "Most companies out there now would ask, 'How can we best exploit our fiber optics?'" Lund says. "But we ask, 'How can we instead deliver today's services as cost-effectively as possible?'"

The solution is also cost-effective because it is scalable and because fiber has a longer life span than some other technologies, Saber says. The technology will be easy to migrate to new technologies.

"We'll be able to add voice-over-IP plug-and-play," he says. "We'll be able to provide OC-3 rates when the customers are ready."

And this migration plan, Saber says, "future-proofs our network today."

Earlier this summer, BellSouth announced that it would be deploying an FTTH solution from Lucent Technologies and Oki Electric Industry Co. Ltd. The solution, which, like FiberPath, is a passive optical network, will be used in a trial to 400 homes in Dunwoody, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta.

The system will provide Internet access, 120 channels of digital video, 70 channels of analog video and 31 channels of digital audio.

As with FiberPath, the optical signal for the system can be split and sent to 32 customer locations. An optical network terminal can be mounted in the garage or on the side of the house, and then two lines - one for the digital portion and an Ethernet connection for data - run to each home, says Bruce Price, sales director for access products at Lucent.

"In this first application, it will be an overbuild of a copper network," he says. The companies plan to eventually develop a one-line solution that would offer telephony as well, he explains.

"We expect to be able to offer telephony soon," says Brian Ford, manager of exploratory development for BellSouth. "But it's unclear whether voice over IP or voice over ATM will be the more attractive strategy. We're taking a wait-and-see attitude."

The technology will be affordable to deploy from a carrier perspective, he says, because the fiber optic components themselves have become cheaper.

Price agrees. "The last time solutions like this were tried was in the mid-'80s," he says. "Fiber costs have gone down, electronics are on a cost curve and the architecture is different. They used to have optics on both ends, but now we're splitting those optics between 32 houses."

Optical Solutions' Lund says that broadband technology, instead of HFC, makes the technology affordable for service providers. "Because we use broadband optics as opposed to digital, we can deliver cable to cable-ready TVs. That's less expensive than doing digital video. And POTS rides practically for free."

Ford believes that such solutions work best in subdivisions - such as the Dunwoody trial - and multidwelling units.

Lund says FiberPath should work well in suburban as well as rural areas with low density because "fiber is low-cost competitive there." Competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) would be good customers in this case. Subdivisions, he says, will be a good customer group for RBOCs.

Also, "anyone putting in new fiber infrastructure is a key candidate," says Saber. He says the company has pending agreements with incumbents, CLECs and cable companies alike, throughout the country.

"There are no technological miracles happening here," he adds. "If you have to do an overbuild or a replacement, why not do it with something that can take you to the next level."