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JIM BARTHOLD
Fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) has been a network dream for years. While technologically feasible, it has had a single large drawback: money. Fiber, and the electronics needed to drive signals over it, is not cheap, starting with just putting the glass into place.
"If the trenches are open, it's between $300 and $500 a residence," says Bernard Daines, World Wide Packets president/CEO. "If you hang it aerially, it's at the $700 to $900 a residence range. If you have to trench it, it's more like $1,250 a residence. Those numbers are not really outrageous."
They are if the plant has already been laid and hybrid fiber/coax is doing the job. Otherwise it's just as cheap to go forth with fiber, he says.
"These numbers are not out of line," Daines says, pointing to a potential market from cable overbuilders. "Look at what hybrid fiber/coax costs with all of its infrastructure and building and planning, and you're looking at a par with those costs very quickly."
Not surprisingly, Daines views power utilities as the most likely takers for his technology. In fact, the Grant County, Wash., Public Utility District is the only announced test partner.
"If you think about a power company getting into the business, they distribute gas; they distribute electricity; why not distribute fiber?" he asks. "They can become a carrier of carriers for whoever wants to sell dial tone, whoever wants to sell Internet service, whoever wants to sell video."
Grant's chief telecommunications engineer, Jonathan Moore, agrees.
"I need to provide a two-way data structure," Moore says. "I could do it with a moderate speed or a low-speed data structure, but it's hard for us to get all the money back out of it that way."
Gigabit Ethernet, though, over a fiber infrastructure is a different animal altogether with a quick payback that keeps on giving.
"We simply charge by the bit for what we consider excess capacity in our network," Moore says. "There's a bit of excess there. We make that available to the public as a means of offsetting our expenses to go out and do the utility functions."
It is, insists Daines, the route of the future.
"If you're offered a $1,200 to $1,500 per subscriber analog cable system or a gigabit of Ethernet full duplex in both directions, which would you choose?" he asks.
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