DSL Prime: Bell Fiber Plans

Only in the U.S. would the phone companies deploy 2 Mbps fiber and call it progress.

by Dave Burstein DSL Prime [December 29, 2003]

BellSouth: right on principle for fiber to the curb/VDSL
BellSouth has an active proceeding, which they and Verizon present as the Commission clarifying that FTTC and FTTH should be treated equally.

"The Commission should state that loop architectures (such as fiber-to-the-curb (FTTC)) that provide service-equivalence to fiber-to-the- home (FTTH), will be treated the same as FTTH for unbundling purposes. The Commission adopted the correct policy goal of not unbundling next- generation networks that support 'truly broadband transmission capabilities.'"

No one at the FCC fetishes sand formed into optical fiber, and if VDSL delivers a similar service welcome the alternative. What's crucial about fiber is that it inexpensively delivers 100 Mbps in both directions, with a future ability to go to a gigabit. VDSL currently is shipping at 50/30, with a 70/30 announcement from Sumitomo in this issue and a 100/25M standard under consideration at T1E1.4. DSM and related techniques should raise that to over 100 Mbps symmetric over the next few years.

BellSouth: wrong on whether they qualify
BellSouth has a million lines of "fiber to near the home" but the speed of the service to customers is a fraction of the speed of a fiber or even a VDSL deployment. The biggest cost, trenching the fiber, has been met, but they haven't installed high speed components for the local loop.

So it's totally absurd to suggest this is service-equivalence to any fiber to the home build I know. They are also considering a bit tax, charges for actually using the speeds they are selling, that will effectively price out of the market almost any video except what BellSouth chooses to deliver directly. With BellSouth selling video to the same customers, and also selling Movielink, that's an obvious anti-trust case DOJ should be already investigating.

The current proposals from the bells that I've seen simply say if fiber is within 500 feet, that should be including in unbundling rules.

2 does not equal 100
2 megabits, the kind of speed on the end of BellSouth's "fiber," is not 100 megabits, and the difference is already significant. A single high quality TV signal is 4-19 Mbps, and many American homes have two or three TVs. Higher speeds mean you can quickly download a movie, game, or Microsoft's latest security patch.

Most important, speed allows people innovation in their use of the web. With a fast enough connection, I can record a church service with my DV camera, and stream it to a dozen neighbor's TVs! I can see full screen a New England town meeting, the other four members of my garage band, or an immersive game. I can watch a Stanford professor lecture on a screen large enough to read what he's writing on the blackboard, or a dance performance with a presence second only to being there.

Realistic: 30 Mbps in 2004, 100 Mbps in 2007
BellSouth's proposal is for homes within 500 feet of fiber, where current VDSL equipment delivers 50 Mbps down/30 Mbps up. That gear costs $90 per home (including modem) with units already in the field in Korea. Verizon, BellSouth, and their suppliers Marconi and Alcatel are working with equivalent parts, and clearly could deliver similar speeds easily to everyone within 500-1000 feet of the fiber termination. Giving regulatory relief to anything less is shortchanging the American consumer.

The wise men of the National Research Council, the most prestigious group ever to look at broadband, in 2001, wrote "Broadband should be defined in a dynamic and multidimensional fashion." The committee pointed to key applications that require much higher speeds, and that speed in both directions is important. David Clark, John Cioffi, Eli Noam, Bob Rowe and a group of their peers pointed out the definition of a minimum broadband service will change rapidly. The goal is 100 Mbps, even if a compromise at 30 Mbps is appropriate for 2004.

ATIS is already drafting a 100 Mbps standard. Ikanos VP Richard Sekar is promising that DMT VDSL (the Bell's choice) can reach "downstream rates up to 110 Mbits/sec and upstream rates up to 40 Mbits/sec." Metalink s QAM "VDSLPlus exceed service speeds of 100 Mbps" in chips "priced below $12.50 U.S., in volume, and are sampling during the current quarter." Someone ingenious at the FCC needs to find language requiring a speed of 30+ in 2004, and 100+ in later years.

Copyright 2003 Dave Burstein.
The DSL Prime Newsletter is reprinted with permission.

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