Like Roger Maris, fiber-to-the-premises deployment usually comes with an asterisk.

The man who broke Babe Ruth's home run record, but needed more games to do it, really wasn't appreciated until well after his death. It isn't yet clear when discussions of U.S. FTTP deployment will get their due — or at least won't be accompanied by the disclaimer, “Of course it will take decades before most people see FTTP.”

But it might come sooner than you think.

The number of people currently served by FTTP is uncertain, but more than 300 communities nationwide are now getting or already have FTTP networks. About 100 of those, in 13 different states, are being served as part of Verizon's FiOS network buildout, while just shy of 170 are cities identified by Fiber Optic Communities of the United States (FOCUS) as having one or more FTTP developments. The Fiber-to-the-Home Council reports more than 200 communities in 37 states are served, or soon will be served, by direct fiber connections, but its numbers have some overlap with the first two lists.

BellSouth still maintains one fiber-to-the-home community in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta. Both Qwest Communications and SBC Communications declined to provide numbers on new developments they are serving with FTTP.

According to FOCUS, direct fiber optic connections to homes and businesses are growing by 500% per year — a growth rate made possible by a small early base, to be sure. But the impact of this technology trend is rippling through the telecom industry and through regulatory and political bodies across the country.

Municipalities have discovered the economic value of direct fiber connections to their businesses and homes and are increasingly taking matters into their own hands. Electrical utilities, some of which are municipally owned, have renewed their interest in using the fiber optic networks they installed for internal use as part of an FTTP network. Likewise, developers and contractors are seeing the value of including FTTH in upscale housing communities.

The California town of Loma Linda took that decision out of its developers' hands with an ordinance that not only requires new homes to be FTTP-equipped but spells out exactly how new homes are to be wired, based on their size, including a requirement for a centralized cabling cabinet in the master bedroom closet and extra jacks in both the master bedroom and family room of each home.

Contractors are required to install the fiber optic networks according to the city specification, just as they install water and sewer lines, and then deed the network back to the city, which owns and operates all the active electronics for the network. Loma Linda turned up its local fiber network last fall, connecting city buildings and other facilities.

According to a city spokesman, Loma Linda expects to add 5000 new residents to its 21,000 current residents and expects many of those to be housed in new developments. Contractors have gone along with the plan for the most part, the spokesman said, even though it adds about $3000 to the cost of the home.

Max R. Kipfer, founder and president of FOCUS, cites research that shows FTTP-equipped homes are valued at $7000 to $10,000 more than identical homes in close proximity that lack direct fiber connections.

So whose community gets fiber to the home and whose doesn't?

Many of the municipalities engaged in deploying FTTP networks are smaller cities and towns that aren't on the radar screen of larger network operators.

For these communities, FTTP is an economic development lifeline, said consultant Wayne Caswell of CAZITech Consulting of Austin, Texas. Communities where manufacturing facilities have closed or other businesses have left look to high-speed data services as an opportunity to start again.

“In these rural, rough bucket kind of town, the industry has gone,” he said. “The kids, as they come out of school, are leaving because there is no economic benefit for them to stay there.”

In his recent white paper, “Big Broadband: Public Infrastructure or Private Monopolies,” Caswell compares two cities in Iowa — Cedar Falls, which installed FTTH, and Waterloo, which upgraded its cable system instead.

“Cedar Falls, which installed fiber, had more new construction and needed less tax money to pay for its growth,” Caswell said. Although Waterloo was almost twice as large as Cedar Falls at the outset, it experienced $135 million in new construction in 2001-2002 while Cedar Falls experienced $166 million in new building in the same time period.

“There is a clear economic benefit to fiber,” Caswell said. “Telework is one major advantage. People can work from home, eliminate commuting and have a higher quality of life.”

The other surefire way to be a fiber community is to be part of Verizon's territory. The company is building FTTP networks in 100 communities in 12 states and has begun selling its FiOS high-speed data services at speeds of 5 Mb/s, 10 Mb/s and 15 Mb/s in eight of those, including California, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia.

Verizon will offer video service later this year and already has secured cable franchises in five towns — Beaumont, Calif., and the Texas towns of Keller, Sachse, Westlake and Wylie, according to a company spokesman.

It is choosing where it builds FTTP networks based on two primary factors — the ease with which a community can be connected and the likelihood that customers will buy high-speed services.

Ease of connections varies with the type of access loops — aerial loops are faster and easier to deploy than buried cable — the population density and the current network. Each area is also evaluated for potential take rate.

“We look at a market and see how many people are buying DSL and cable modems,” said a company spokesman.

The profile of communities served may change drastically in the second half of 2005 when Verizon adds technology for multiple-dwelling units to its FTTP portfolio. That will enable the company to more easily serve more urban areas and those with high density of apartment dwellers, the spokesman said.

Verizon has to completely finish the network within a given community before it begins to market its services — in order to avoid the kinds of problems it and other telephone companies ran into when they started selling DSL — and were fielding calls from customers who badly wanted the service but lived in an area not yet reachable by DSL technology.

Verizon did come under some criticism from Congressman Edward Markey (D-Mass.), who stated in a Boston Globe article that the telephone company might be guilty of “digital redlining.” It's a similar charge to one SBC has faced for its broadband buildouts — critics claim the phone companies are ignoring urban and less affluent areas to extend new technology only to the privileged.

It's a pointless criticism, said Carlos Flores, vice president of Adventis and a longtime telecom consultant.

“Fiber deployment is a very expensive proposition for Verizon,” he said. “Other major ILECs are waiting to see if Verizon has success or not, so this experience will have an impact on the entire industry. Some of the numbers I've seen on what it costs them to build this are $500 to $800 a customer. And their payback has to be within a year-and-a-half, tops.”

As a result, it is essential that Verizon follow the course of minimizing deployment costs and “going after customers that are going to generate enough revenues to cover their investment,” said Flores. “If it's a low-revenue potential, high-investment area — that's a non-starter.”

Municipalities are also under the gun for building fiber networks, however, and their primary critics are the incumbent telephone companies and cable companies. The crux of the criticism is that if is unfair for public entities, whether municipal governments or municipally owned power companies, to use taxpayer money to subsidize network construction.

To date, 13 states have laws that in some way limit municipalities from building telecom networks, but they vary widely in scope and content, said Jim Baller, of Baller & Herbst, an attorney and expert in the field.

“In most cases, a municipality can work within the law and still build a broadband network,” he said. “It can make the business case very difficult. In some of these other states, there would be a lot more successful projects if they didn't have to cope with these restrictions.”

As municipal broadband networks have become more prevalent, however, a wave of new legislation is hitting the state houses.

“There is a trend toward more onerous laws,” Baller said, pointing to a pending bill in Texas that would essentially lock municipalities out of operating networks. “The laws are much more comprehensive insofar as they would cover services of all kinds, and they either impose very significant restrictions that the private sector does not comply with, or, in some cases, there are just flat out prohibitions.”

Because the incumbent telcos are well-connected politically and already have large lobbying organizations, they stand a better chance of convincing a state legislature to take action on their behalf, Caswell said.

In some instances, the fight is local — and long. BellSouth and Cox Communications have been fighting the Lafayette (La.) City-Parish Council over its plans to build an FTTH network using up to $135 million in bonds. The two service providers filed a lawsuit in January to halt the project, which will enable the city to sell Internet, telephone and cable TV service.

Caswell points to projects such as Utah's Project Utopia, which will build FTTP in 11 Utah cities.

“They faced really tough competition from Qwest, which bought TV ads, went to the legislature and fought hard against Utopia,” he said. “Qwest is now a partner, and they are going to use the network.”

While municipalities need to build in safeguards to protect taxpayers and should seek outside confirmation of network plans, they should not be subject to outright bans, he added.

“If taxpayers are at risk, you have to tighten up the controls,” Caswell said. “A city may need a feasibility plan about the impact on taxpayers because no one wants to wind up paying broadband taxes. But there are a lot of different business models — private/public partnerships, using bond money — and all sorts of break-even points.”

There is also the opportunity for all stakeholders to participate, he said. Hospitals, schools and local governments are among the immediate beneficiaries of direct fiber connections and could participate in the early funding or bond process.

Municipalities are winning some of the political battles. The Indiana legislature just allowed an anti-municipal broadband bill to die in committee, but during the same week, a similar bill was introduced in neighboring Illinois.

“We will continue to try to educate people about the importance of fiber all the way to the premises because that is paramount,” FOCUS' Kipfer said.

At this point, it is a trend picking up major steam.