[c-nsp] Fiber

[Mark Tinka]

On Thursday 12 November 2009 09:10:02 pm madunix wrote:

> I need to know your opinion about fiber to desk i.e. pros
> and cons..

I tend to agree with Matthew and the others that have 
commented on this.

The issue of distance and bandwidth notwithstanding, we've 
experienced situations where delivering fibre to somebody's 
home or desk is considered more for marketing mileage than 
any technical reasons. However, that also tends to set you 
up for a potential PR disaster since customers tend to "eat 
that **** up", and misunderstand it at the same time.

Unless you're trying to solve a distance problem, and/or 
your customer requires anything more than 1Gbps (well, 
Cat-6a, as others have mentioned, has been standardized - 
but diffusion may take a while) then consider copper. 
Otherwise, the additional potential cost in maintaining it 
does not really justify passing over copper solutions, IMHO.

Moreover, fibre deployments to the home or desk require CPE, 
which, in very many cases, speak copper on the other end. So 
what's really the point? Needless to say, laptops, routers, 
switches, set-top boxes, wi-fi AP's, PC's, Mac's, game 
consoles, Tv's, e.t.c., all ship with RJ-45 dual- or tri-
rate copper ports as standard these days. So no need for 
CPE, no need for additional customer training, e.t.c.

<digress>

Again, distance and bandwidth notwithstanding, this, in my 
mind, tends to question the long-term sustainability of 
FTTH, either through PON (Passive Optical Networks) or 
Active Ethernet. Since FTTH is looked at as a potential 
replacement for regular ADSL (i.e., consumer broadband), how 
many users can eat up a 1Gbps connection, assuming their ISP 
let them? This is not considering bandwidth used by IPTv and 
such, as customers buy channels for IPTv services, not 
bandwidth to drive the channels (that's the service 
provider's problem).

</digress>

Cheers,

Mark.
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