A year and a half since three Bell operating companies issued a joint request for proposals of fiber-to-the-premises equipment, the technology has been somewhat eclipsed by advanced forms of DSL. But FTTP vendors see new strides for their technology in a coming second wave of deployment. IDC analyst Sterling Perrin spoke with Telephony’s Ed Gubbins on the subject.

Ethernet in FTTP: Ethernet in general moving into the [passive optical networking] space is the biggest thing we’re looking at. Since it’s doing so well overseas, with [Japanese carrier] NTT committing to Ethernet PON rollouts, what we think could happen is: Ethernet with its price benefits and driven by additional rollouts the size of NTT, letting that technology mature quickly through a major PTT, that technology could spread out to Europe and the U.S. In the U.S., it’s most likely to show up among rural carriers and municipalities--everywhere else but RBOCs. That could change the nature of the U.S. market for that kind of second-tier carrier. If they switch over to Ethernet--and Wave7 is benefiting from this already--that could move the U.S. market toward Ethernet [FTTP], which would bring in a whole other set of vendors or force these startups to re-architect these products pretty quickly. It’s much less likely that that would hit the RBOCs because they’re so committed to the APON technology, it’s hard to imagine them changing anywhere in the near term.

On video: Video is a big question. The way APON technologies have been built out, there’s a separate channel for broadcast video. A WDM channel separate from the data though over the same fiber. That’s the Verizon approach. That gets you a broadcast video stream which is not that different from the legacy cable market. What SBC is doing--even though it’s not PON for the most part, though there will be a PON component--is IPTV. Interactive TV over an IP packet stream. SBC’s argument, and I think it’s a good one, is that that gives you a differentiated service from what the cable companies are doing.

On consumer bandwidth demand: Everything’s experimental at this point. The problem with the interactive model is it’s very bandwidth-intensive. There’s a question of how much bandwidth the consumer’s actually going to want. We’ve heard estimates of 20 Mb/s to 100 Mb/s. Even if you’re at the 20-Mb/s level, its straining the FTTN architecture SBC is rolling out. I think they’re at that threshold. There’s a question of whether the interactive TV model over a DSL architecture can work, based on customer demand. That’s being watched. If you’re doing Verizon’s approach, is that enough to differentiate yourself from the competition? The ideal situation would be fiber to everybody with full interactive TV. That would get you the bandwidth, but there’s very high cost to that. No one’s going that route in the U.S. In Asia they are. The [U.S.] carriers haven’t sorted it out. The differentiator with the IPTV model is [high-definition] TV. That’s probably the biggest near-term differentiator SBC’s talking about. But if you’ve got multiple HDTVs running in a house, that would quickly squash what you could get from SBC. And with the Verizon approach, you can’t get that at all because it’s broadcast.