Fish

Finally, $10K per home is wrong. According to you for Verizon to connect 20 million homes to FiOS will clost $200 billion. Uh no - Wall St isn’t that dumb.

The way this battle will shape up is that cable will give away voice and Verizon will lose money on basic video as they each fight for triple play customers. Cablevision will be hurt the worst since they have 100% overlap with Verizon. And they know, it’s coming. So does Wall St.

So lets assume of a moment that Telco Fiber to the home really started to take off. With the advent of IPTV in the next 5 years, and cable already is moving content between Master headends and HUB’s via IP instead of older proprietary solutions. The coming of D3.0 will provide a migratory path to making video distribution IP only, with SDV providing the bandwidth re-use near term opening up more bandwidth for more D3.0 channel. My point is going forward the distribution of IPVIDEO will be standard.

Here is the kicker, remember the HFC, cable already has a fiber infrastructure to the neighborhood, all they have to do is replace the fiber node with a switch, and upgrade the ‘coax to fiber’ to the house. Not lay it in the ground from the central switch all the way to the house. At 10k per house, actual cost of the fiber to the house, not the 650 “hook up cost” telco’s tell wall street.

So Cable and Telcos really both have the opportunity to provide fiber to the home, cable as an upgrade, telcos as a green field.

IMHO Netrydr57

Addendum - This Cisco overview of DWDM provides some insight into the functional differences among broadband architectures; it does not, however, include the critical economic data required to provide a basic starting point in understanding infrastructure competitive dynamics.

Doing that would expose the cable quoted bandwidth numbers for what they are: bogus.
For cable to offer a guaanteed 10 Mb/s service in a 400 home system, using 256 QAM, cable would require every bit of bandwidth on the plant leaving nothing for TV or VoD. There is no physical way that they can ever come close to 50 Mb/s guaranteed without a total plant rebuild.

Let’s face it, when it comes to network technology the average consumer is not very smart. I don’t mean this disparagingly, it’s just not a subject most consumers are intimately familiar with. So when a cable executive claims that they will someday enjoy 160Mbps broadband services, the average consumer probably believes that—someday—they’ll be able to download 160 million bits worth of stuff (music, videos, etc.) each second. While these prototypical consumers aren’t network-savvy, they do know when they’ve been taken. When they fail to achieve the aforementioned 160 megabits per second, they’ll know they’ve been suckered by a marketing pitch.

The central problem is that broadband has always been described using a single number. Seven hundred kilobits. One point five megabits. One hundred and fifty megs. Consumers, naively, think this is the speed at which the broadband connection operates. They don’t understand that this is only a measure of peak downstream bit rate. In other words, if everyone in your neighborhood agrees to stay off the internet while you’re doing your work then, yes, these speeds might be achievable. But the moment other people begin using the internet you’ll begin to realize that your cable connection is shared. And your speed will drop significantly. Much like freeways, the sign may say that 65 miles per hour is the speed limit but try driving that fast during rush hour.

There is an important quantitative measure of network performance about which consumers will become increasingly knowledgeable (and demanding): peak-to-average bandwidth ratio.

Peak-to-average bandwidth ratios, basically a measure of network oversubscription, were often as high as 20-, 30-, or 40-to-1 back in the days when most internet traffic was HTTP and SMTP. This meant that service providers would sell 40 people a one megabit service despite the fact that those 40 people were sharing a single one megabit connection. That was ok because people mostly downloaded web pages and then spent a few minutes reading them. Or sent an email and didn’t know or care if it took one second or ten to reach its destination.

However, with internet traffic increasingly comprised of streaming media, these oversubscription factors need to drop dramatically in order to preserve the illusion that the subscriber actually has that much bandwidth. Five- or ten-to-one might be more appropriate for today’s demanding internet user. In IPTV service delivery infrastructure the challenge is even more substantial. The peak-to-average bandwidth ratio for the portion of the access network allocated to IPTV must be 1-to-1. Yikes.

It is here that telcos have a distinct advantage of the cable guys. This is because, while both access networks are oversubscribed, in the telco plant (whether it is fiber or copper) a network element (DSLAM, OLT, or MSAP) intelligently performs the oversubscription. Changing service quality for a single subscriber, with all due apologies to net neutrality socialists, is as simple as a software command. Changing service quality for all subscribers served by that network element involves an upgrade of a single network uplink. In the cable plant oversubscription is a function of the fact that the access network—analog or digital, DOCSIS 2.1 or 3.0—is a shared medium. Improving service quality for some or all users involves physical network reengineering. Much more complex, expensive, and time-consuming.

It’s about time service providers truthfully described the product called broadband. If they did, the Brian Robertses of the world would have to admit that average downstream speeds of their 160 megabit product (assuming, say, a 500-home node with a 50 percent broadband take rate) are more like 640Kbps, a peak-to-average bandwidth ratio of 250. Double yikes.

Did Comcast tell you that their average node size is 400 homes? I am very close to them and I doubt seriously it is anywhere near 400 HPN. The present day Comcast is made up of many acquisitions, many of which were designed with 2000 and even 2500 homes pockets. They are trying to segment these nodes down to smaller sizes but I can assure you they are nowhere near 400 homes per node.

Well, Cox in the Fairfax area offers higher speeds than elsewhere. They do a 15Mbps down/2 Mbps up in FIOS areas.

One of the amusing (but frustrating!) things about all of this was Verizon accurately responding by bragging that they could offer true 100Mbps symmetric right now if they wanted to, and that they are in tests right now, and anyway GPON will give them even more bandwidth to play with– and then trying to talk around why they’re not offering those sorts of speeds right now. “No truly compelling reason,” which is true insofar as that means that they don’t think that people would pay them more for the extra speed, so it wouldn’t increase profits. “We don’t need do until there’s real competition” would be another honest response, but for some reason they didn’t want to say that one.

After CES this year, Gates declared we won’t recognize TV in 5 years when he saw Verizon introduce a 150 Mb/s connection. It will probably take a little more than 5 years but the future is about getting your content from the Internet and sending it to your TV via some new product from Apple or Microsoft.

In Europe, many younger people have compelely dropped TV services the way people now have dropped landline phone service. They future is a cell for communication and the nternet for content.

FiOS is simply better technology than the shared bandwidth of cable - even with DOCSIS 3.0 and channel bonding.

The big hit for Verizon is in telephony. It’s a lot less expensive for cable to get into the telephone business than it is for the telcos to get into the TV business… and so, Comcast can get into into a price war over telephone service… and still earn a tidy profit.

My view? Cable senses they’re at a peculiar moment in time. Verizon is mortgaging the company on FIOS — if cable can deny them a return on that investment, Verizon becomes a bit player in the residential market.

I think Verizon’s prepared for that and almost expects that it will happen. I don’t think it’s a co-incidence that the major FIOS wiring is happening in areas that have a heavy business concentration. Ultimately, I think the cable companies will dominate the residential market, while Verizon concentrates on the commercial side. Not a bad idea for either… it’s what they’re both good at.

As far as cell phones go, I have had a cell phone for 18 years. Cell phone serice is certainly much cheaper than it was 18 years ago and cheaper than it was 5 years ago. Verizon charges me $79.99 for 1350 minutes - I couldn’t get anything close to that when I started with Verizon from AT&T in 2000. FiOS will lower cable’s prices on internet access. Trust me, that’s how competiton and free markets work.

We’ve seen it with cell phones, TV (ever wonder why DirecTV, Echostar, Comcast, and Verizon are about the same $), etc.

Competition does not automatically guarantee low prices.

I don’t care for any of these companies. Verizon is inept but G-PON is infinitely superior to HFC. Verizon will force Comcast and the rest to lower their prices which is good for consumers.