Verizon CTO on in-home LTE, IPTV migration and more

On Verizon’s dynamic optical links trials: The idea is you put an SS7 equivalent in the optical network, to be frank. You treat bandwidth as a call and the provisioning of that bandwidth as a dynamic event from one point to another. It’s more than bandwidth on demand, but that’s the usual descriptor of one of the capabilities this brings. Another one would be self-inventorying of network elements. Another would be the ability to quickly re-provision or reconfigure the network for survivability or business continuity purposes. Instead of going through these massive inventory back office systems with provisioning and touching 10 elements to get from point A to point B, you just have the endpoint elements talk to each other through the intervening elements, and they cooperate and set up the capacity virtually automatically.

We have a service in New York today called Just in Time, JIT. We’re turning up another major city; I don’t think we’ve announced it yet. We’re building toward the ability for our enterprise customers or even our own managers of our optical network to use this optical control plane capability to provision bandwidth on a regular basis, so that we don’t have to go through longer intervals to provide a major enterprise customer with an OC-3 or a GigE or whatever. We could basically put the tool in their hands, maybe through a Web portal, and they would launch the call. They would provision the bandwidth, it would be ready virtually instantaneously – we’re talking like within a couple minutes, and they’d be up and running and the clock would be running on the billing and all that would flow through. But they wouldn’t have to say I need a GigE and we come back to them and say what’s your committed due date customer-desired due date -- CDD and CDDD. They might say, “I need a GigE in a week or a day.” That’s what we’re really striving to do here is meet CDDD.

On keeping PON splitters in the central office as opposed to the outside plant: I’m hearing the independents are doing that in low-density situations to avoid a dispatch. Otherwise they’d have to run out to the splitter cabinet. I suppose there would be situations in terms of the relative distance of the service area from the CO -- either very short or very long -- where that might be better. But then on the other hand, a variation in the outside plant may not be worth it because of the differences in methods and procedures. We have looked at CO-based splitting to complement field-based splitting just to increase the split, but we haven’t elected to go in that direction. It’s remained a paper study, basically.