As Mr. Rogers leaves the neighborhood, fiber is poised to make its big debut there

It's no secret that all kinds of service providers are furiously deploying fiber backbones and digging up city streets to install fiber connections directly to large businesses and large office buildings in metropolitan areas.

In the meantime, however, there are a variety of forces fueling fiber's march into residential neighborhoods across North America.

In most cases, it is still not economical to begin digging up homeowners' front yards to lay fiber to the home (FTTH).

But it certainly is becoming more economical—and even more important—strategically imperative, for communications service providers to start bringing fiber as close to residential and small business owners as soon as they possibly can. That's because if they aren't planning to do it soon, someone else is likely to beat them to the punch—and it may even be the incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC).

Be careful what you wish for

Ironically, telcos and cable operators have themselves to blame for hastening the fiber evolution. That's because one of the most powerful forces driving fiber to the neighborhood (FTTN) in all its forms is the success of DSL- and cable modem-based broadband services. And that leads to the bandwidth conundrum.

Although service providers implemented these technologies in large part to delay the need to deploy fiber, they are having somewhat the opposite effect. People who have tasted high-speed access aren't hesitating to dive into bandwidth-hogging applications such as video and audio streaming. As a result, what's enough bandwidth today on the access backbone and the access link itself may not be enough for long.

“Big service providers are starting to look at what the minimum competitive bandwidth they are going to need five to 10 years from now,” says Jim Holley, senior vice president of marketing for NEC Eluminant. “As soon as new, higher-bandwidth services are out there, the bandwidth requirement is going to go up pretty quickly.”

That should not come as a surprise to those who've been around long enough to remember folks in the mid-90s talking about DSL as an interim technology whose role would be to whet consumers' appetites for services that ultimately would be provided by switched digital video or hybrid fiber/coax (HFC).

It took a little longer than expected for DSL to gain a foothold in the public network, but now that its there, applications such as Napster are creating a horde of “bandwidth-hungry monsters” at the other end of the line. And these monsters will be pushing their broadband connections to their limits.

According to an October 2000 FCC report, nearly 1 million DSL links and 2.2 million cable modems were in service as of June 30, 2000, an increase of 157% and 59%, respectively over a six-month period. And, interestingly, the increase is not limited to densely populated metropolitan areas. The number of sparsely populated ZIP codes with high-speed subscribers increased by 69% during the first half of 2000, compared with an increase of only 4% for the most densely populated ZIP codes.

“I have always argued that [asymmetrical] DSL would stimulate and pull fiber deployment closer to the home, and I still believe that and think it is happening,” says David Kettler, vice president of science and technology for BellSouth. “Our ADSL rollout is ramping up rapidly and will continue to whet customers' appetites for more bandwidth.”

BellSouth, which currently serves 200,000 ADSL customers, expects to serve a total of 600,000 customers by the end of this year.

“Ultimately, service provider architectures that employ DSL will come to look increasingly like fiber-to-the-curb architectures. The driver here will come from small businesses, which are already operating at several megabits of information over DSL,” states a report from Communications Industry Researchers. “Couple this with the growing demand for services like video streaming and full-motion video, not to mention application hosting, and the market will increasingly run into a bandwidth demand that will encourage fiberization closer to the customer.”