Filling the pipe
By: By Ed Gubbins
"Filling the pipe" is the tag line for this year's Fiber-to-the-Home Conference, being held this week in Orlando. With a decided focus on content, the show is focused on which services will drive consumers to make the most of their fiber broadband connections. So what are some of the things that will fill the pipe?...
Nightmare on Fiber Street
By: By Carol Wilson
The Web is abuzz with stories of Verizon technicians accidentally hitting gas lines and causing leaks, hitting electrical wires and causing house fires, and hitting sewage pipes and causing stinky puddles in the backyard...
Getting the drop on fiber
By: By Ed Gubbins
In a recent article about cost declines in fiber-to-the-premises deployment, I wrote about how pre-connectorized fiber drops (the fiber that meets the house) helped Verizon Communications bring down deployment costs...
Don't call it a comeback
By: By Ed Gubbins
Someone once accused my wife of being a glass-half-empty type of person, to which she replied, "No, I'm actually a glass-half-full person. But it's that other half that I'm worried about"...
The ROADM space
By: By Ed Gubbins
At this year’s Optical Fiber Communications conference, like many before it, there was a lot of talk about reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs)...
About time
By: By Carol Wilson
Last week's Louisiana State Supreme Court decision that ended the legal challenge to the planned Lafayette fiber-to-the-home network put a punctuation mark on a struggle that became emblematic of the challenges municipal networks face...
Fiber data shocker
By: By Ed Gubbins
The news that there are now more than 1 million fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) subscribers in North America came as a shock to some analysts last week...
Fiber lights a fire under NTT
“Losing FTTH means losing everything, I think,” Hiromichi Shinohara, director of Access Network Service System Labs for Japanese carrier NTT, told the crowd at the Fiber-to-the-Home Conference in Las Vegas this morning. ...
Fiber optic confusion
By: By Carol Wilson
It’s clear that there is still uncertainty among telecom service providers when it comes to what form of fiber optic access network makes the most sense--fiber to the premises, fiber to the curb or fiber to the node. ...
Optical kick
Between April and June, the optical equipment market saw its best quarter in the last four years, according to data released today by Ovum-RHK. Fiber access deployments, along with metro and backbone network upgrades, drove wireline spending higher than expected in the second quarter....
Opportunity rocks
By: By Tim McElligott
Market opportunity. It's the first figure cited in every hopeful business case, the apparition that pops the eyes and the banquet that waters the mouth of every entrepreneur...
The next guy
By: By Ed Gubbins
I'm told that Tellabs CEO Krish Prabhu got on a plane shortly after the company's Thursday morning conference call (hopefully to the Bahamas, considering how stressful last week was). And as a result, I still haven't found out why he told investors on that call that Tellabs' chances of meeting Verizon Communications' early deployment requirements for Gigabit passive optical networking gear were "as good as the next guy's" ...
Traffic patterns
By: By Ed Gubbins
I'm told the flow of traffic here at Globalcomm is lighter than attendees expected. But while vendors bemoan the amount of traffic on the show floor, they should be heartened by the fact that carriers are spending their time talking about the high flow of traffic in their networks...
Serge wins the skunk hunt
By: By Ed Gubbins
Last summer Alcatel CEO Serge Tchuruk shrugged off the suggestion that large-scale consolidation among big telecom equipment vendors was long overdue...
Overheard at OFC/NFOEC
By: By Ed Gubbins
For those of you unable to attend this year's Optical Fiber Communications/National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference, here's a bit of what you missed...
Turning Japanese
By: By Ed Gubbins
Verizon Communications bragged this week that it had winnowed the cost of its fiber-to-the-premises deployment to $890 per home. That is a dramatic improvement over the $1400 per home it was paying a year ago. But I can't help but wonder...
Going steady
By: By Ed Gubbins
Lucent Technologies' move to acquire Riverstone Networks gives it a quick jump toward the front of the line in the carrier Ethernet equipment market. According to Infonetics Research, Riverstone was second only to Cisco Systems in the 2004 global carrier Ethernet equipment market...
Call me Ishmael
By: By Ed Gubbins
Plenty of questions swirl around the surprise news today of Broadwing CEO David Huber surrendering his crown. A spooky-smart scientist, Huber has long been regarded as the Captain Ahab of all-optical networks...
Me-too muni fiber
By: By Ed Gubbins
The city of Paris is considering a municipal fiber network of some sort. Details of the plan were hard to come by, as the mayor's office didn't reply to any of my questions, which were all admittedly scavenged from my threadbare memory of high school French class...
Fiber to the HMO
By: By Ed Gubbins
Talk about getting a lump of coal in your stocking. This month Verizon announced it would freeze the pension and retiree medical benefits of 50,000 management employees at the end of next June...
Markets and micro-markets
By: BY NEALE MARTIN
Communications companies are embarking on a bold, expensive plan to re-create themselves to serve customers in the 21st century...
Tracking FTTH's rise
Over the last three years, Michael Render, principal analyst for Render, Vanderslice & Associates, has taken a leading position in evaluating the U.S. market for fiber to the home...
Focal point: FTTx
By: By Jason Meyers
Fiber to the "X." That description says it all about this nascent but increasingly important network architecture for telecom service providers...
Writing optical history
By: By Vince Vittore
Historians eventually may look back on the current era in telecom and humor themselves by thinking about the decisions traditional telecom service providers had to make...
Fiber up
By: By Vince Vittore
I have a confession: The first time I met Jim Dahmen, I thought he might have been celebrating happy hour on some European time zone...
