COMEBACK City! THIS IS THE FIRST conference of its kind in this country – an event devoted entirely to the relationship between a community’s economic vitality and the presence of advanced broadband networks. Nations around the world have recognized this powerful linkage and responded to it – as have a growing number of communities in the United States. Each event in this new conference series will be held in a city with an advanced broadband system. Each event will have an impressive array of speakers whose mission will be to help attendees evaluate the options and opportunities and develop the optimal, affordable solution for their communities. The first conference is in Danville, Virginia – the Comeback City that bounced back from devastation with a visionary broadband strategy that’s creating jobs and attracting the businesses and industries of tomorrow. Danville Conference Site: Institute for Advanced Learning and Research TO SPONSOR OR EXHIBIT: email [email protected] or call 505-867-2668 www.bbcmag.com FOR MORE INFORMATION: www.TownsAndTechnologies.com FOR ASSISTANCE CONTACT: 877-588-1649, or email [email protected]Early Bird Attendee Rates: $110.00 – Expiring Soon. To receive 5X discount off full price of $475 use VIP Code: DAN110 To Register Visit: http://bbcmag.com/danville/. Economic Development Conference Series: In partnership with the City of Danville, Virginia Institute for Advanced Learning and Research Municipal Fiber Networks Broadband Communities Magazine November 8–9, 2012 Sponsors Include: PREMIER GOLD $ )XUXNDZD &RPSDQ\ SILVER FEATURED
Transcript
ComebaCk City!THIS IS THE FIRST conference of its kind in this country – an event devoted entirely to the relationship between a community’s economic vitality and the presence of advanced broadband networks. Nations around the world have recognized this powerful linkage and responded to it – as have a growing number of communities in the United States. Each event in this new conference series will be held in a city with an advanced broadband system. Each event will have an impressive array of speakers whose mission will be to help attendees evaluate the options and opportunities and develop the optimal, affordable solution for their communities.
The first conference is in Danville, Virginia – the Comeback City that bounced back from devastation with a visionary broadband strategy that’s creating jobs and attracting the businesses and industries of tomorrow.
Danville Conference Site: Institute for Advanced Learning and Research
Early Bird Attendee Rates: $110.00 – Expiring Soon.To receive 5X discount off full price of $475 use VIP code: DAN110To Register Visit: http://bbcmag.com/danville/.
Economic Development conference Series:In partnership with the city of Danville, Virginia
Institute for Advanced Learning and Research
Municipal Fiber NetworksBroadband communities Magazine
November 8–9, 2012
Sponsors Include:PREMIER GOlD SIlVER FEATuRED
Joey Durel, President, Lafayette, La., City-Parish accepts the 2012 Cornerstone Award on behalf of LUS for “Using FTTH to improve citizens’ quality of life.”
Cheryl Barraco, Director of Telecommunications, Avalon Bay Communities, Inc. and Steve Sadler, Vice President, Ancillary Services, Post Apartment Homes, LP, present this year’s OMPA Award to Richard Sherwin, CEO, Spot On Networks for the leading technology from a wireless internet service provider.
Hilda Legg, Former RUS Administrator, BroadbAand Champion and Vice Chair, Broadband Communities and Thomas Navin, Partner, Wiley Rein, LLP address a crowded room.
WELL ORGANIZED AND VERY USEFUL“As a first time participant, I found the conference well organized and very useful, and I hope to participate again next year.”
– Jeff Jackson, Manager of Information Technology Lumbee River EMC
SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE“It is great to network with other people in the same business as well as speaking face to face with the providers … there is something for everyone. Good conference/networking.”
– Carol Quigley, Property Technology Specialist Forest City Enterprises
INTERACTIVE AND FRIENDLY“Highly interactive and friendly forum.”
– David Russell, Solutions Marketing Director Calix
KEY PEOPLE IN THE MDU WORLD“Good information and met lots of key people in MDU world … connections with leaders in MDU segment … quality of attendees and panels. Workshops were great!”
– Theresa Bash, BDP/MDU Manager Century Link
GREAT INTRODUCTION FOR NEWCOMERS“It was a great introduction for newcomers on broadband situation in the USA. Can learn a lot on other’s positive and negative experience.”
– Gregor Smolej, Product Manager Iskratel (Slovenia, Europe)
HELPED ME UNDERSTAND“Helped me understand much about broadband that I previously hadn’t been exposed to.”
– John A. Seymour, City Administrator City of Opelika, AL
GOOD AND INFORMATIVE“Very good and informative conference. The exchange of information is very good.”
– Michael Webb, Project Assistant Region 2 Planning and Development Council of West Virginia
(Below) Lawrence Strickling, Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information; Administrator,
NTIA, U.S. Department of Commerce addresses the crowd at the 2012 awards luncheon.
(Above) Gary Evans, CEO and Milda Hedblom, JD., Ph. D, Connectivity Consultant, of Hiawatha
Broadband Communications entertain attendees with their advice on how to address ailing FTTH systems.
Drew Clark, Executive Director, Partnership for a Connected Illinois, asks a question of the panelists.
GOOD MIX OF TOPICS“Good mix of topics and networking.”
– Damon Porter, Managing Director MBBN
EDUCATIONAL“Always a great educational and networking experience.”
– John Huggins, President Broadband Connect, LLC
Here’s what attendees are saying about the 2012 Summit! Make plans to attend the 2013 Summit now.April 16 – 18, 2013 • InterContinental Dallas • www.bbcmag.com • To sponsor or exhibit: email [email protected] or call 505-867-2668
lIgHtIng tHe wAy to tHe broADbAnD future
lighting the way to the broadband future
Secure your seat today by calling 877-588-1649, or visit our website at www.bbcmag.com
lighting the way to the broadband future
To exhibit or sponsor, contact: Irene Prescott [email protected], or call 505-867-2668
exclusive admission rate for bbC Subscribers only.
Of er ends October 31st.Use VIP Code: bbCSub(Save $545 of regular Summit price of $895)
$350
Mark your CalendarS
lighting the way to the broadband future
Secure your seat today by calling 877-588-1649, or visit our website at www.bbcmag.com
lighting the way to the broadband future
To exhibit or sponsor, contact: Irene Prescott [email protected], or call 505-867-2668
Kyle hollifieldChairman, FTTH Council, NA
and Vice Chair Broadband Communities
Jim ballerPresident
The Baller Herbst Law Group, PC
andrew CohillPresident
Design Nine
2013 BroadBand Summit ChairmenLending their expertise to the Creation of a timely, dynamic Program
The hon. hilda leggFormer RUS Administrator
and Vice Chair Broadband Communities
The SummiTiS The leading evenT for neTwork
builderS and deployerSThe Broadband Communities Summit is the leading venue for information on digital and broadband technologies for buildings and communities. With a focus on residential properties, developments and municipalities, the Summit has become a must-attend event for network builders and large-scale and wholesale buyers and users of broadband technologies, equipment, and services.
A Top Venue
For Unveiling
Leading-Edge
Research
New Ideas,New Markets,New Agenda
an eSSenTial venue for induSTry leaderSDevelopers and property owners attending the Summit include representatives from such organizations as:
Hillwood Communities – A Perot Company • Trammell Crow Residential • Buckingham Companies • Education Realty Trust • Fairfield Residential • Peak Campus Management • Camden Property Trust • Forest City Residential • AIMCO • American Campus Communities • AMLI Residential • Archstone • Associa • Atticus Real Estate • Herman & Kittle Properties • KB Home • Landmark Properties • Laramar Communities, LLC • Midtown Alliance Development • Avalon Bay Communities • Baxter Southwest Corporate Realty Services • BH Management • BRE Properties • Campus Living Villages • Post Properties • Preiss Company • Pulte Group • Raymond James Real Estate • Related Companies • Capstone Real Estate Management • Carmel Partners Developers • Casey Development Ltd • Choice Property Resources • Colonial Properties Trust • Edward Rose Companies • Equity Residential • Essex Property Trust • Flournoy Properties • H Properties LLC • Mills Properties • Picerne Development • Riverstone Residential Group • The Michelson Organization • The Roberts Companies • Tonti Properties • Trimarchi Property Management • Trump Organization • UDR Inc. • Verde Apartment Communities • Village Green Apartment Communities • Waterton Residential • Westdale Asset Management
Broadband providers in attendance include the major incumbents – telco, cable and satellite – plus private cable operators, rural telcos, competitive overbuilders, municipalities, and more. Economic development professionals, state broadband officials and community broadband activists are also well represented.
henry PyeVP, Residential Technology Solutions,
Velocity Advisory ServicesRealPage, Inc.
bryan raderCEO
Bandwidth Consulting LLC
Jane PattersonPresident
The View Forward-Go Forward
Galen updikePresident
Rural Telecommunications Congress
A placewhere deals
get done
Excellent
Content Plus
The Best
Networking
lighting the way to the broadband future
Secure your seat today by calling 877-588-1649, or visit our website at www.bbcmag.com
lighting the way to the broadband future
To exhibit or sponsor, contact: Irene Prescott [email protected], or call 505-867-2668
Kyle hollifieldChairman, FTTH Council, NA
and Vice Chair Broadband Communities
Jim ballerPresident
The Baller Herbst Law Group, PC
andrew CohillPresident
Design Nine
2013 BroadBand Summit ChairmenLending their expertise to the Creation of a timely, dynamic Program
The hon. hilda leggFormer RUS Administrator
and Vice Chair Broadband Communities
The SummiTiS The leading evenT for neTwork
builderS and deployerSThe Broadband Communities Summit is the leading venue for information on digital and broadband technologies for buildings and communities. With a focus on residential properties, developments and municipalities, the Summit has become a must-attend event for network builders and large-scale and wholesale buyers and users of broadband technologies, equipment, and services.
A Top Venue
For Unveiling
Leading-Edge
Research
New Ideas,New Markets,New Agenda
an eSSenTial venue for induSTry leaderSDevelopers and property owners attending the Summit include representatives from such organizations as:
Hillwood Communities – A Perot Company • Trammell Crow Residential • Buckingham Companies • Education Realty Trust • Fairfield Residential • Peak Campus Management • Camden Property Trust • Forest City Residential • AIMCO • American Campus Communities • AMLI Residential • Archstone • Associa • Atticus Real Estate • Herman & Kittle Properties • KB Home • Landmark Properties • Laramar Communities, LLC • Midtown Alliance Development • Avalon Bay Communities • Baxter Southwest Corporate Realty Services • BH Management • BRE Properties • Campus Living Villages • Post Properties • Preiss Company • Pulte Group • Raymond James Real Estate • Related Companies • Capstone Real Estate Management • Carmel Partners Developers • Casey Development Ltd • Choice Property Resources • Colonial Properties Trust • Edward Rose Companies • Equity Residential • Essex Property Trust • Flournoy Properties • H Properties LLC • Mills Properties • Picerne Development • Riverstone Residential Group • The Michelson Organization • The Roberts Companies • Tonti Properties • Trimarchi Property Management • Trump Organization • UDR Inc. • Verde Apartment Communities • Village Green Apartment Communities • Waterton Residential • Westdale Asset Management
Broadband providers in attendance include the major incumbents – telco, cable and satellite – plus private cable operators, rural telcos, competitive overbuilders, municipalities, and more. Economic development professionals, state broadband officials and community broadband activists are also well represented.
henry PyeVP, Residential Technology Solutions,
Velocity Advisory ServicesRealPage, Inc.
bryan raderCEO
Bandwidth Consulting LLC
Jane PattersonPresident
The View Forward-Go Forward
Galen updikePresident
Rural Telecommunications Congress
A placewhere deals
get done
Excellent
Content Plus
The Best
Networking
lighting the way to the broadband future
Secure your seat today by calling 877-588-1649, or visit our website at www.bbcmag.com
lighting the way to the broadband future
To exhibit or sponsor, contact: Irene Prescott [email protected], or call 505-867-2668
April 16–18, 2013 • DAllAsSTarT PlannInG now for SummIT 2013
This year’s event will once again be hosted at the
InterContinental Hotel – an excellent hotel in a vibrant
neighborhood full of superb dining and other attractions.
The InterContinental is convenient to the two main airports in Dallas – DFW and Love Field – and adjacent to Addison Airport, ideal for private aircraft.
it’s the leading event for network builders
and deployers.The Summit is widely recognized as the number one venue for information on digital and broad-band technologies for buildings and communities.
activities and Sessions include:• Newest Case Studies on How Broadband
Spurs Economic Development • Applications to Generate Profits for
Network Operators • Awards for Today’s Leading
Broadband Communities • World-Class Keynoters • Evening Receptions and
Networking Events
Programs now being planned involve:• The latest broadband
strategies of cities and communities
• Lessons learned from others – what to emulate and what to avoid
• Sessions on getting your customers and constituents on board with your plans.
• Panels on increasing the ROI of your buildings. • Roundtables on improving the appeal of
your properties.
who Should attend:Attendees include those involved in the design and development of community networks, including:• Real Estate Developers • Property Owners • Independent Telcos • Municipal Officials • Private Cable Operators • Town Planners • Economic Development Professionals • Architects and Builders • System Operators • Investors • Utility Organizations • System Integrators
Expanded property owner
advisory board
NEW: Sessions on
commercial
properties
Appealing
to residents
with state-of-
the-art tech
amenities
How to attract
and retain residents
Exhibit Hall
and evening
cocktail
receptions
2013Cornerstone Awards and
KeynoteLuncheon
register early to receive Major discountsRegistration Now Open
Cheryl BarracoDirector Of TelecommunicationsAvalon Bay Communities, Inc.
Steve SadlerVice President, Ancillary ServicesPost Apartment Homes, LP
———— the NeW 2013 ADvIsoRy pANel of pRopeRty oWNeRs ————
Jeffrey BondVP, Ancillary Services
Related
Brian McIntireDir., Information Technology
Buckingham Companies
Hunter AllenCorporate Analyst
Colonial Properties Trust
Woodrow StoneVP, Client Services
Pinnacle Family of Companies
lighting the way to the broadband future
Secure your seat today by calling 877-588-1649, or visit our website at www.bbcmag.com
lighting the way to the broadband future
To exhibit or sponsor, contact: Irene Prescott [email protected], or call 505-867-2668
April 16–18, 2013 • DAllAsSTarT PlannInG now for SummIT 2013
This year’s event will once again be hosted at the
InterContinental Hotel – an excellent hotel in a vibrant
neighborhood full of superb dining and other attractions.
The InterContinental is convenient to the two main airports in Dallas – DFW and Love Field – and adjacent to Addison Airport, ideal for private aircraft.
it’s the leading event for network builders
and deployers.The Summit is widely recognized as the number one venue for information on digital and broad-band technologies for buildings and communities.
activities and Sessions include:• Newest Case Studies on How Broadband
Spurs Economic Development • Applications to Generate Profits for
Network Operators • Awards for Today’s Leading
Broadband Communities • World-Class Keynoters • Evening Receptions and
Networking Events
Programs now being planned involve:• The latest broadband
strategies of cities and communities
• Lessons learned from others – what to emulate and what to avoid
• Sessions on getting your customers and constituents on board with your plans.
• Panels on increasing the ROI of your buildings. • Roundtables on improving the appeal of
your properties.
who Should attend:Attendees include those involved in the design and development of community networks, including:• Real Estate Developers • Property Owners • Independent Telcos • Municipal Officials • Private Cable Operators • Town Planners • Economic Development Professionals • Architects and Builders • System Operators • Investors • Utility Organizations • System Integrators
Expanded property owner
advisory board
NEW: Sessions on
commercial
properties
Appealing
to residents
with state-of-
the-art tech
amenities
How to attract
and retain residents
Exhibit Hall
and evening
cocktail
receptions
2013Cornerstone Awards and
KeynoteLuncheon
register early to receive Major discountsRegistration Now Open
Cheryl BarracoDirector Of TelecommunicationsAvalon Bay Communities, Inc.
Steve SadlerVice President, Ancillary ServicesPost Apartment Homes, LP
I encountered this concept in 2006, in a speech by communications law professor Susan Crawford. Crawford said that broadband’s economic benefits are so enormous – so far exceeding the costs of creating it – that rather than ra-tion it, societies should use more of it.
For a recovering economist like me, accustomed to thinking in terms of al-locating scarce resources, this was mind-boggling – something like a physicist’s learning that a perpetual motion ma-chine had been invented.
Abundant shouldn’t be confused with free. Building a broadband network re-quires a large investment of resources. Nor does abundant mean unlimited; many of today’s networks are congested. Clearly, network builders need to recoup their investments and manage conges-tion. However, the possibility of abun-dance suggests that new broadband networks should be designed to allow as much capacity as possible and should be managed and marketed to enourage use of that capacity.
There is only one way to do that: Build fiber to every endpoint, equip the net-work with up-to-date gear (and keep it up to date) and – most important – price the top speed to appeal to the mass market. That’s what Google Fiber has just done.
Is GooGle FIber replIcable?True, Google has advantages that include access to its own, highly efficient long-haul networks and the ability to design
its own equipment – and even so, not ev-eryone is convinced it will return a profit. (“Larry Page should nip this bad idea in the bud,” a Forbes columnist fulmi-nated.) However, Google’s vice president of access services, Milo Medin, makes a good case that the age of abundance has truly arrived, and not just for Google.
In a recent speech, Medin said the growth of optical capacity, the buildout of long-haul networks and improvements in network equipment have contributed to radical declines in bandwidth costs worldwide, and these trends are all likely to continue. Delivering a gigabit is com-mercially viable, he noted, not so much because FTTH equipment costs have declined as because of scaling across the entire Internet ecosystem.
Low-cost bandwidth to homes will encourage Internet content and service businesses (of which Google is one) to develop new products, which in turn will deliver more value to consumers. At first, Medin said, people will continue doing what they do with traditional broad-band, just as dial-up users focused on email and e-commerce when broadband first arrived, but because gigabit con-nections make homes “effectively part of the cloud,” new computing forms and new ways of delivering media will soon emerge.
Do any other Internet content busi-nesses want to follow suit?
Bandwidth Abundance
Google Fiber ushers in a new era – one that challenges users not to conserve bandwidth but to find more uses for it.
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Visit www.bbcmag.com for up-to-the-minute news of broadband trends, technologies and deployments.
Follow BroadBand Communities on Twitter at www.twitter.com/bbcmag for alerts about breaking news items.
New York artist Irving Grunbaum sheds light on the FTTH Conference. See p. 77 for more information about the speakers pictured on the cover.
ABOUT THE COVER
DEPARTMENTS
provider perspectiveNot Your Father’s pco business | 14By Bryan J. Rader ■ Bandwidth Consulting LLCThe competitive landscape for private cable operators has changed, but new market segments present good opportunities for them.
Why We Need More Fiberremote House calls come to rural New england | 16By Joan Engebretson ■ Broadband CommunitiesA telepresence robot helps doctors visit homebound patients – as long as they have adequate broadband.
The lawFcc opens proceedings on satellite Dishes and online Video Distribution | 18By Carl E. Kandutsch ■ AttorneyThe commission requested comments on municipal rules about satellite dishes and the regulation of over-the-top video providers.
service provider strategiesDriving Deployment of Fiber to the Home | 20By Costas Troulos ■ Diffraction AnalysisDifferent types of companies have different motives – and opportunities – for deploying fiber to the home.
summit coveragebroadband Transforms rural Health care | 24By Masha Zager ■ Broadband CommunitiesThe FCC Rural Health Care Pilot Program helps rural hospitals improve the health of residents and the viability of communities.
building Networks That Work | 30A BBC Staff Report Fiber to the unit, wireless access in dense housing and overbuilding towns with fiber all pose challenges. Here are some answers.
Middle-Mile Networks a research Network Grows in pennsylvania | 36By Masha Zager ■ Broadband CommunitiesA new research and education network will allow anchor institutions in Pennsylvania to connect and collaborate.
economic Development broadband and economic Development in appalachia | 40By Ken Demlow ■ NewCom TechnologiesBetter broadband could help Appalachia address its many social and economic challenges.
IN THIS ISSUE
Fiber-to-the-Home conferenceour special Guide to the show | 77Be prepared to make the most of your time at the 2012 FTTH Conference. This special guide includes a welcome message from the president of the FTTH Council, an exhibit floor map, a complete agenda, and listings and news releases from featured companies.
8th edition: Fiber-to-the-Home primerWhat Fiber broadband can Do for Your community | 43Produced by the editors of BroadBand Communities
Technology Interconnect solutions For FTTH Drop cable Installations | 96By Jerry D. Jackson ■ 3M Communication Markets DivisionSplice or connector? Fusion or mechanical? Preconnectorized or field-terminated? Confused? Here’s how to choose.
placing Fiber Drops To commercial customers | 104By Lou Maiolo ■ CMSSometimes the best interconnect solution is to bypass the connection altogether.
Home Networkingreaching Into the Home Network | 110By Masha Zager ■ Broadband CommunitiesService providers that remotely configure and troubleshoot home network equipment have fewer truck rolls, happier customers and new revenue streams.
broadband appsThe New World of Video | 112By Masha Zager ■ Broadband CommunitiesHow pay-TV providers can thrive in a world of Internet video, mobile customers and proliferating devices.
When you have XFINITY, you’re not just building a project.You’re building the future.Want to build the hottest place in town? XFINITY can help with TV, Internet and Voice that work seamlessly together—so your residents can access and enjoy everything they love anytime, anywhere. With XFINITY, your residents have access to over 75,000 On Demand TV shows and movies on TV and streaming online. XFINITY is the fastest Internet provider in the nation according to PC Mag, which provides your residents with all the speed they need to do more of what they want online. Plus, with the best in call clarity, your residents get unlimited nationwide calling to the US, including Canada and Puerto Rico. With XFINITY, your location is built to last.
Yes, Wall Street (and some in gov-ernment) think cellular systems will “solve” the broadband prob-
lem. Yes, capital for new builds has been expensive and hard to get. Yes, regula-tory uncertainty – unavoidable, given the mandate to reform the Universal Service Fund – has been a drag on new builds. And yes, supporters of municipal broadband have been busy fending off attacks by commercial broadband pro-viders in many states – providers who have no plans to serve smaller, rural communities with fiber but who can’t stand the idea that the communities could build systems themselves.
Amid the wreckage, however, are many new initiatives. Some, such as Google’s 1 Gbps network – now going live in Kansas City – and Gig.U, have gotten a lot of attention; others, not so much. Still others are in flux.
Video is being rethought, for in-stance. The American Cable Association is now supporting over-the-top video initiatives in large part because program-ming content owners have ratcheted up prices too high for carriers to profit con-sistently. Must-carry rules and deals that force carriers to buy channels they don’t want slice video margins even thinner.
For several years, Apple tried to sell TV programming through a set-top box that bypasses cable operators but uses the data bandwidth that the operators provide. Now, in an about-face, Apple is looking to partner with major cable companies instead. A company Apple’s size doesn’t make small-scale deals. However, small incumbent carriers in the aggregate have a quarter of all FTTH customers and could be quite interested
Mega-Opportunities for FiberTraditional ways of doing business in the broadband industry are being upended – but in a good way. Entire industries are now looking to fiber to solve their problems.
in what Apple is trying to sell, especially because their subscribers, or Apple itself, would front the cost of the box.
NeW applIcaTIoNs For FIberThe smart grid presents another oppor-tunity. A recent presentation by Craig Bowden for the New England Fiber-optic Council points to new wind farms and solar energy sites as major oppor-tunities for fiber interests, which could manage not only the output but also the sites themselves. The market is big-ger than most people think – new do-mestic wind capacity is pushing 50,000 MW, the equivalent of 40 nuclear power plants. Almost 7,000 MW was installed last year alone. The presentation can be found at www.nefc.com (click on Pre-sentations), and many statistics are avail-able at www.AWEA.org, the site of the American Wind Energy Association, which has 2,400 members worldwide.
The solar energy industry is smaller but topped $6 billion in 2010 in the United States, according to the 1,100-member Solar Energy Industries Association (www.seia.org).
Colleges are counting on savings from delivering courses online to help blunt the tuition increases that have been getting so much attention lately. The health care industry is looking to telehealth and telemedicine to help rein in ballooning health care costs.
IBM now says there’s an increas-ing role for solid-state data drives in its cloud computing centers. They cost 10 times more than spinning disk drives (and will still be three times more ex-pensive in 2015), but the need for speed is driving the technology – speed only fiber can exploit.
BroadBand Communities is getting the message out through the magazine and the new custom seminar business (see www.bbcmag.com/classes). Our new series of local economic develop-ment conferences begins in Danville, Va., in November (see www.bbcmag.com/danville). Finally, make plans to attend this year’s Fiber-to-the-Home Council annual conference in Dallas (see www.ftthcouncil.org). v
Financing fiber-to-the-home networks is challenging today, but new applications that
require fiber’s speed and reliability are changing the economics of FTTH.
Customers are accessing the network from a broad arrayof devices and new media, causing service providers toreexamine how they define access. ADTRAN® is workingwith customers to deliver innovative solutions for everyingress point in the network. This innovation helps ADTRANservice provider customers accelerate change and quicklylaunch new revenue generating services.
For more information, visit www.adtran.com/access and discover how ADTRAN is Reinventing Access.
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For years, private cable operators (PCOs) all seemed to follow the same path. They picked a satel-
lite TV platform – DISH Network or DIRECTV – and selected a large market or two in which to drop anchor. Often, these markets were major Sun Belt cities with a lot of fresh MDU communities.
This model worked well for a long time. Operators relied on exclusive retail agreements with no competition and good revenue sharing. As long as PCOs met the contractual performance stan-dards, property owners were satisfied.
Over the past few years, things began to change. Some PCOs couldn’t survive using the old formula. Others sold out to larger, newer PCOs or to franchise cable operators. In the traditional MDU space, there was little PCO growth.
What happened? How did the in-dustry get here?
The original PCO business model lost its effectiveness for many reasons. At one time, PCOs were the only competition for franchise cable. Don’t like Comcast or Time Warner Cable? No problem – sign up with a PCO. Want to customize a channel lineup for your resident pro-file? Great – work with a PCO. Property owners didn’t have a choice other than the franchise guy, and many owners de-spised the franchise operators’ “take it or leave it” approach to MDUs.
Over time, however, PCOs were no longer the only game in town. Verizon and AT&T showed up with commit-ments to overbuild roughly 50 million units across their territory and bring “real competition” to the market with FiOS and U-verse – and property owners liked them. Unfortunately, AT&T and Verizon seemed to like the same markets
PCOs did – Dallas, Atlanta, Houston, Miami and so forth. For many owners, this trend accelerated their interest in offering their communities a choice of providers rather than a single provider.
In fact, some apartment developers became so enamored with choice that they are planning to offer new residents a choice of TV service from a cable com-pany, a telco provider and a satellite ser-vice. Their poor leasing agents have a lot of marketing materials to preview.
This makes the traditional market a losing proposition for PCOs. Some PCOs that flourished in the last growth cycle, five to 10 years ago, now find sur-vival difficult. Consider this scenario: 30 percent of users choose the cable or telco provider, 10 percent take satellite service and another 30 percent simply don’t want to pay for TV. That leaves just 30 percent of the market for the PCO.
Choice can be a good thing, and I’ve seen PCOs succeed in this environment. Most of the time, however, the model doesn’t work for them.
To meet competition from telcos, franchise cable operators also improved their products over the last few years. PCOs now compete with 100 Mbps broadband, TV Everywhere services, 25,000 video-on-demand titles and dozens of new programming packages. They no longer win all the deals they used to win. The competition has simply become better.
a NeW MoDelThis forces PCOs to find new sectors that play to their strengths. The good news is that four new markets are open-ing up: senior housing, student housing, condominiums and hospitality.
The size of each of these markets is enormous. There are more than 1.5 mil-lion senior housing units in the United States, and the number is growing. There are more than 10 million student housing units, 7 million condo units and 5 million hotel rooms. Each market is plenty big enough for PCOs to target; combined, they are actually larger than PCOs’ traditional stomping grounds. In addition, none of them places a high pri-ority on provider choice.
Senior housing owners want cus-tomized bulk TV packages with limited set-top box hardware. Student housing seeks bulk broadband to the bed at vari-ous speeds with managed bandwidth and upgrade features, along with a good basic TV product. Condos want bulk agreements for digital TV and often for broadband (bulk broadband is a new, fast-growing opportunity). Hotels seek better products, more reliable service and new features. These are areas better suited for PCOs than other providers.
All four segments are ripe with po-tential. It’s great to see the PCO busi-ness evolve into new areas of growth and opportunity. It’s time to join the ride in this new automobile. v
Facing an altered competitive landscape in their original stomping grounds, private cable operators are seeking new housing markets where their traditional strengths are more advantageous.
By Bryan Rader ■ Bandwidth Consulting LLC
Not Your Father’s PCO Business
about the authorBryan Rader is CEO of Bandwidth Consulting LLC, which assists providers in the multifamily market. You can reach Bryan at [email protected] or at 636-536-0011. Learn more at www.bandwidthconsultingllc.com.
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Health care specialists in rural Vermont and New Hampshire soon will spend less time driving
and more time consulting with patients, thanks to a new robotic telepresence de-vice from manufacturer VGo.
Using the device, “specialists can stay in the office and see multiple patients where they might otherwise have to drive,” explains Craig Amoth, director of development and community relations for Visiting Nurse & Hospice of Vermont and New Hampshire (VNAVNH).
The device looks a bit like a Segway with a video screen and camera in place of handlebars. The specialist remotely con-trols the device via an Internet connec-tion to the patient’s home, which must have Wi-Fi or 4G wireless capability. The specialist moves the device, zooms in to examine a wound and advises the patient and visiting nurse about treatment.
As Ned Semonite, vice president of product management and marketing for VGo, explains, the patient and nurse will see an image of the specialist’s face on the video screen and converse and interact with the specialist in a lifelike manner. The company recommends a minimum of 1 or 2 Mbps symmetrical bandwidth. Fiber to the home is ideal for this applica-tion, both for its upstream capability and its reliability.
Each VGo robotic telepresence de-vice sells for about $6,000. VNAVNH plans to lease four of the devices. Visit-ing nurses will still need to visit patients and will take a VGo device with them on those visits, but specialists won’t have to travel so frequently. If, as expected, a
specialist can save 30 to 45 minutes per patient, such a device could quickly pay for itself.
“The challenge is going to be getting reimbursed for this technology,” notes Amoth. For now, insurance companies don’t recognize a remote consultation using robotic telepresence as a visit from a specialist. “Ideally, we want to be able to show the efficacy of this so the reim-bursement will be there,” Amoth says.
More Uses For THe VGo Another VGo user is Boston Children’s Hospital, which sends devices home with patients to monitor recovery from surgery. Children can also attend school virtually, communicating with other children and participating in class.
Some businesses use VGo devices to help remote workers feel less isolated. “You can feel more like you’re a part of
the team,” comments Semonite. “You can go to lunch or see what’s happening in the warehouse.”
Although the VGo can’t open doors, multiple VGo devices can be stationed throughout a company location, and employees can log off one and onto an-other as they move around the site.
In the future, VGo envisions more value-added services delivered from the network. For example, a health care practitioner could advise a patient about a medication and then play a video about the medication on the VGo screen.
The company also hopes to expand the functionality of its product by, for ex-ample, enabling it to measure blood pres-sure and pulse. Remotely controllable arms also could be added. “The vision is to get you to some place where you’re not and replicate as closely as possible the ex-perience you’d expect if you were there,” notes Semonite. v
Remote House Calls Come to Rural New EnglandA mobile telepresence device helps homebound patients confer with health care specialists. Broadband is a necessity – FTTH is better.
By Joan Engebretson ■ Contributing Editor, Broadband Communities
about the authorJoan Engebretson is a Chicago-based freelancer who has been writing about the telecom industry since 1993. She can be reached at [email protected].
The FCC recently opened two proceedings of interest to readers of this magazine – one of direct
interest and the other of potential long-term significance. Of immediate inter-est to MDU professionals is a possible change to the FCC’s rules on over-the-air reception devices (OTARD). Of less immediate but potentially wider sig-nificance is the commission’s request for public comments on whether the defini-tion of a multichannel video program-ming distributor (MVPD) should be expanded to include online distributors of video programming services.
DIrecTV/DIsH NeTWork peTITIoN To aMeND THe oTarD rUlesThe OTARD rules, adopted in 1996, prohibit restrictions on the right of a property owner or tenant to install, maintain or use an antenna to receive video programming from direct broad-cast satellites, broadband radio services or television broadcast stations. The FCC later amended the rules to apply to property dedicated to a renter’s exclusive use, such as a balcony or patio, and to customer-end antennas used to receive or transmit fixed wireless signals.
To facilitate competition from sat-ellite TV providers, the OTARD rules prohibit landlords, condominium or co-operative owners associations and even
local governments from restricting a resident’s ability to install an individual dish antenna in an area within the resi-dent’s exclusive control.
Specifically, the rules prohibit re-strictions that unreasonably delay or prevent installation, maintenance or use; unreasonably increase the cost of installation, maintenance or use; or pre-clude reception of an acceptable qual-ity signal. The rules allow limited re-strictions related to safety and historic preservation. In addition, a community association or landlord can restrict the installation of individual antennas if a central or common antenna is available. Because the OTARD rules apply only to individual antennas installed within
areas under an MDU resident’s exclu-sive control, restrictions on antennas in-stalled in a common area such as a roof or an exterior wall are enforceable.
Under today’s rules, a municipality could prohibit individual residents from installing dish antennas on roofs or ex-terior walls of an apartment or condo-minium building even if the landlord or a condominium owners association has no such restriction.
If a property owner or an owners as-sociation doesn’t object to the installa-tion of an individual dish antenna in a common area, why should local govern-ment have the authority to override the MDU community’s decision? The Satel-lite Broadcasting and Communications
FCC Opens Proceedings On Satellite Dishes And Online Video Distribution
By Carl E. Kandutsch ■ Attorney
The FCC is considering whether municipalities should be able to trump property owners’ preferences about placement of satellite dishes and whether OTT video providers should be regulated like cable TV providers. The second issue has far-reaching consequences.
about the authorCarl Kandutsch, a former FCC attorney, is in private practice representing MDU property owners and broadband service providers on broadband communications and related real estate matters. Dr. Kandutsch may be contacted through his website (www.kandutsch.com), via email ([email protected]) or by telephone (207-659-6247).
If a property owner doesn’t object to installing dish antennas in common areas, why should local
The LawAssociation, along with DISH Network and DIRECTV, filed a petition with the FCC raising precisely this question. Specifically, the petition requests that the OTARD rules be amended to pro-hibit local governments from restricting the installation of over-the-air reception devices in the common areas of MDU properties.
Fcc seeks coMMeNT oN DeFINITIoN oF MVpDFederal regulation of the cable television industry hinges on the definition of an MVPD. A company that fits the defini-tion is subject to most federal laws and FCC regulations governing cable televi-sion; a company that doesn’t is exempt. Does the definition cover companies that distribute video programming con-tent online, using Internet connections to deliver signals to television sets?
Although industry players, from the newest, smallest start-ups to entrenched cable and telco behemoths, are all strug-gling to find effective business models, most people believe that the majority of video programming content will soon be delivered by means of high-speed Inter-net connections rather than over man-aged networks owned or controlled by cable, satellite and telephone companies. The impending eclipse of traditional ca-ble television delivery systems by online video distribution presents tremendous challenges for market participants, poli-cymakers and regulators.
For owners of programming content and managed signal distribution sys-tems, the most difficult challenge is to monetize the explosive dissemination of proprietary content over decentralized, “end-to-end” data networks that no centralized authority can control. What rules and norms will govern the online distribution of digital content that can be instantaneously replicated and trans-mitted over the Internet at a marginal cost approaching zero?
For regulators, the challenge is this: Because most online (OTT) video dis-tributors do not clearly fall within the current MVPD definition, existing cable television regulations do not apply to those OTT video providers. Would application of some or all legacy regu-lations to online distributors impede or
liberate emerging markets? Nobody – including the FCC – has ready or reli-able answers to these questions.
Cable television regulations that ap-ply only to MVPDs include rules that govern retransmission consent, program access, statutory copyright licensing, cable franchising and cable inside wiring procedures. At some point, the govern-ment will have to decide whether these and other rules apply to online video con-tent distributors. Currently, the FCC is compelled to address these issues because of a complaint filed with the FCC’s Me-dia Bureau by an online video distribu-tor, Sky Angel, against the Discovery Channel. The complaint alleges that the network unfairly denied Sky Angel ac-cess to popular content in violation of the commission’s program access rules. Those rules are designed to ensure that competitive MVPDs have nondiscrimi-natory access to programming affiliated with a cable operator.
In an interim ruling, the bureau stated that the program access rules do not apply to Sky Angel because the company does not use “multiple chan-nels” that “include a transmission path” as required in the statutory definitions of “MVPD” and “channel.” In other words, because it transmits program-
ming content to consumers using the public Internet and does not own or op-erate a network facility, Sky Angel is not an MVPD and may not take advantage of the program access rules.
The industry is divided on this is-sue. In its filing, Comcast, the nation’s largest cable operator, argues that OTT distributors should not be considered MVPDs, in part because cable television regulations would burden the growing OTT industry. DIRECTV believes that if a service behaves like and competes with other MVPDs, it should be regu-lated in the same way.
Clearly, the commission under-stands the importance of the issue, does not feel comfortable with the interim ruling and wishes to proceed with cau-tion. Therefore, the Media Bureau is-sued a request for public comments on whether the terms “MVPD” and “chan-nel” should be interpreted to include online video programming distributors such as Sky Angel.
The request for comments, along with the underlying Sky Angel program access complaint, represents the tip of a large policy iceberg that will reveal itself during the coming years as technologies change and markets develop. v
The FCC decided in an interim ruling that online programming distributors are not MVPDs. It is asking for comments before its final decision.
ResouRces • FCC request for comments on DIRECTV/DISH Network petition:
Though nearly 60 countries now have some sort of fiber-to-the-premises activity, there are many
more countries and regions with little or no FTTP deployment than there are regions where deployment and adop-tion are booming. Examining the roll-out strategies for the different players in the market helps to show what the main drivers for deployment are.
The active players in the broadband access market can be categorized accord-ing to five broad groups. Three can be considered existing telecommunications access players, and two are new entrants.
• Incumbent operators correspond to the current or former state-owned monopoly in each country. They own the copper twisted-pair net-works that are used to provide tele-phony services to consumers.
• Cable TV operators provide televi-sion content via coaxial cable net-works. They typically own access net-works up to the customer premises, and in this regard they have market power similar to the incumbents, in the areas where they are present.
• Alternative operators (usually called competitive providers in the United States) arose as a result of liberalization in the telecommuni-cations market. At the outset, these operators owned no infrastructure. They usually offer services over cop-per telephone networks by resell-ing wholesale products provided by incumbents. An incumbent that deploys FTTP outside its legacy network footprint is considered an
alternative operator in that market for the purpose of this analysis.
• Public or semipublic agencies are new entrant operators directly or partially owned by the public sec-tor. They are typically public utilities or newly established organizations charged with executing a broadband plan. They often own the rights-of-way needed to deploy new infra-structure.
• Real estate developers, another category of new entrant, build large housing developments, apartment communities or office complexes. They also usually own the rights-of-way within their development areas.
The strategies of these players may ap-pear similar, but they are driven by differ-ent requirements. The prevailing general strategies for each type of player in the market are summarized in Table 1.
INcUMbeNT operaTors Incumbents are the historical guard-ians of copper telephone networks. They usually enjoy a monopoly over ac-cess that leads them to want to protect their copper networks, and the revenues they generate, for as long as possible. Incumbents have the option to migrate customers directly to all-fiber networks, but many choose the less expensive step of deploying some fiber to intermediate nodes in their access networks and offer-ing VDSL-based services instead. When incumbents do deploy FTTP, their strategy is determined by the following:
• Market developments: Alternative operators often react to incumbents’ reluctance to invest by building their own access infrastructure, which can lead incumbents to deploy FTTP as a competitive response.
• Geography and demographics: Pop-ulation and housing densities are
Driving Deployment Of Fiber to the Home In today’s economic environment, most deployers are cautious about FTTP projects. What can be done to get fiber to more homes and businesses?
The FTTP strategies of different types of players in the market may appear similar, but they are
driven by different requirements.
By Costas Troulos ■ Diffraction Analysis
about the authorCostas Troulos is a senior analyst with Diffraction Analysis, a telecommunications consulting firm based near Paris, France. He specializes in government policy toward next-generation access networks and the socioeconomic impact of those networks. You can reach him at [email protected]. This article is adapted from the Diffraction Analysis report A World of Fiber (2012 Edition). To obtain the full report, write to [email protected].
crucial factors in selecting areas in which to deploy FTTP because they influence the level of investment required. Local demographics and demand expectations are therefore very important factors influencing incumbents’ rollout decisions.
• Regulatory regime: Regulation also plays a significant role in incum-bents’ rollout strategies. Incumbents want to avoid regulatory mandates to open their FTTP networks to com-petitors and often exercise their po-litical power or structure their rollout plans (including technology choices) to help them achieve this end.
cable TV operaTors Cable TV operators are, in some re-spects, another type of incumbent, in some cases with national reach. They own the content or the content broad-casting rights and extensive access facili-ties. They can choose to upgrade their
networks either by replacing parts of their coaxial distribution networks with fiber or by overbuilding with FTTP. As they are typically the second-largest players in the access market, the rollout strategies of cable TV operators often have a significant influence on the strat-egies of incumbents. The rollout strate-gies of cable operators are determined by the following factors:
• The condition and capabilities of the cable network: Cable TV opera-tors using outdated technologies can combine network upgrades with the development of FTTP infrastruc-ture. Introducing newer and more
efficient network equipment goes hand in hand with partial or even complete replacement of coaxial net-works with fiber.
• Competitive market dynamics: FTTP deployment by other opera-tors often spurs cable TV operators to invest in infrastructure, although this is not the only consideration. Large cable TV operators with near-national coverage can afford to adopt a wait-and-see strategy, while those with local and regional reach tend to invest sooner to improve their triple-play offerings in the face of competi-tion from larger players.
• Financial health: In recent years, mergers and acquisitions have led to a more significantly concentrated market. This trend of consolidation often leaves cable TV operators with low investment capacity.
alTerNaTIVe operaTors Alternative operators are at a strong dis-advantage in the access market. Where the regulatory regime permits, such as in Western Europe, they use local loop unbundling (LLU) products of the in-cumbent. In other parts of the world (Russia, India and elsewhere) alterna-tive operators have no means to reach customers other than by building their own infrastructure. They usually deploy FTTP, therefore, either to avert the costs of LLU or to expand their networks to reach more end users. To a large extent, alternative operators’ initiatives drive the investment activity in the access market. The factors that most influence the strat-egy of alternative operators are
• Strong market presence: Alterna-tive operators often deploy FTTP in areas where they have reached a critical mass. They construct ac-cess infrastructure where they have enough customers to make operating an FTTP network sustainable.
Competitive conditions, regulatory regimes, the quality of existing networks and the market
• Availability of backhaul: As the smaller players in the market, alter-native operators can expand only if backhaul networks are available at competitive prices. Backhaul is seen as prerequisite to the expansion of FTTP outside major urban centers.
• Regulatory regime: In regions where regulation of incumbents’ copper networks is strong and effective, al-ternative operators have fewer incen-tives to deploy FTTP because, like everyone else, they can use incum-bents’ LLU products. The reverse is also true: Regions with poorly devel-oped LLU regimes tend to exhibit substantial FTTP growth.
pUblIc-secTor orGaNIzaTIoNs The public sector considers investing in fiber access when it sees that the benefits of high-speed broadband outweigh the costs and risks. Typically, the public sec-tor takes the initiative in areas where the private market is reluctant to go, such as remote, isolated small villages. Public endeavors can be supported by public funds (for example, European structural funds or other stimulus packages) or by public or semipublic businesses such as electric and water utilities.
One of the greatest advantages pub-lic FTTP developers have is that they typically own the rights-of-way for the construction of their networks. The roll-out strategies of public-sector organiza-tions are influenced by the following:
• Participation of public utilities: When utilities lead FTTP projects, rollouts frequently follow upgrades of their existing energy distribution networks and use the existing duct systems of those utilities. Constructing two net-works at once is more cost-efficient than constructing them separately.
• Funding conditions: The use of pub-lic funds often comes with condi-tions attached, and the agencies that make those funds available carefully scrutinize rollouts and business strat-
egies. For example, the most popu-lar type of public FTTP funding in Europe, state aid for services of general economic interest, requires 100 percent coverage of a region and provision of wholesale services on an open-access basis.
• Maturity of the market: The level of maturity in the broadband mar-ket has a major influence, especially in national broadband plans or in underserved subnational markets. When private access providers par-ticipate in publicly funded FTTP projects, rollout timing is signifi-cantly improved, and existing net-work facilities and duct distribution systems can be reused. These rollouts are typically aggressive and cover a substantial part of the population.
real esTaTe DeVelopers Real estate developers understand that fiber will increase the desirability and the value of their property and help them compete against other property developers. FTTP is often an easy ser-vice to bundle with their current of-ferings, which may include electricity,
heating and water distribution. Because they own the rights-of-way within their own buildings or campuses, many de-velopers have no competition in the last mile. The rollout strategies of real estate developers are determined by
• Level of demand for broadband: When demand for high-speed broad-band services is high, real estate de-velopers equip their properties with fiber cables up to each apartment or dwelling unit. In areas with low de-mand, fiber is typically deployed to building basements, and existing in-ternal copper cabling is used to reach apartments.
• New developments: Real estate de-velopers considering FTTP deploy-ment often look first to greenfield developments. In existing buildings, the decision to upgrade their tele-communications infrastructure to fiber is made on a case-by-case basis depending on the demand and char-acteristics of the local market.
• Availability of backhaul networks: In some cases, property developers have expanded their involvement to include provision of retail services to their properties, but they can do this only in areas where backhaul services are available at affordable prices. Table 2 highlights the deployment priorities for different types of FTTP
Public-sector deployers and real estate owners have the advantage of owning rights-of-way.
Exhibit 3 highlights the deployment priorities for the different type of FTTP player based on the geographic characteristics of the areas where FTTP is deployed.
Exhibit 3: Deployment priorities are strongly influenced by geography and market size.
Geography Incumbents Cable TV operators
Alternative Operators
Public New Entrants
Real Estate Developers
Tier-1 areas: capitals, business and residential centers
Primary focus: exploit economies of scale for market domination
Attractive due to high demand: focus depends on scale and installed customer base
Attractive due to high demand: deployments to the existing customer base
National broadband plans include Tier-1 areas, often at a later phase
Only applicable to areas where the developer
owns or is developing new housing/offices. These are often
equivalent to Tier-4 areas in terms of size, but are more
likely to be located in Tier-1 and Tier-2 cities
and towns.
Tier-2 areas: mid-size cities and selected suburbs
Second priority areas, often addressed after competitors start to deploy FTTP
Attractive areas due to favorable competitive conditions
Deployments based on market share to gain first mover’s advantage
National broadband plans include Tier-2 areas. It’s harder to justify public subsidies or aids
Tier-3 areas: smaller cities, towns and suburbs
Rarely Deployments occur on a case by case basis, provided there is critical customer mass
Attractive areas due to favorable competitive conditions – depending on backhaul availability
Deployments occur in combination with plans for Tier-4 areas
Tier-4 areas: villages and rural areas
Attractive areas for municipal projects (lack of private interest).
Table 2: Deployment priorities of different types of FTTP deployers
Service Provider StrategieSplayers based on the geographic characteristics of the areas where FTTP is deployed.
coNclUsIoNs aND recoMMeNDaTIoNs Governments and operators agree that fi-ber access networks need to be deployed in the relatively near future. However, al-though FTTP markets around the world are growing, in general they are growing much more slowly than anticipated. The actors in the market remain cautious about rolling out FTTP networks, and with good reason. The aggressive roll-outs of the near past, made under false assumptions of prosperity and demand expectations, often failed.
Today, only government-led proj-ects follow aggressive rollout strategies on any significant scale. The rest of the market takes small steps – sometimes too small – out of fear of utter economic disappointment.
Following are high-level recommen-dations to the various players in the eco-system to help them better understand the challenges in deploying FTTP and increase their likelihood of success:
Recommendations for incumbents, cable operators and alternative operators:
• The time to collaborate is now. The FTTP business is associated with high risk, primarily because of the high up-front cost of invest-ment. One way for access providers to avert premature economic failure is to share deployment costs with other stakeholders. Access providers should explore different forms of col-laboration, such as reciprocal rights to lease a competitor’s infrastructure.
• Small markets have strong monop-oly potential. Although incumbents and large cable TV operators often shun Tier-3 and Tier-4 markets, practical experience shows that ac-cess providers that enter these mar-kets often gain significant first-mover advantages. Put simply, small mar-kets might appear economically un-attractive, but they have good poten-tial because there is less competition.
• Exploit opportunities in wholesale markets. Retail services are not the
only way to commercialize a fiber network. Access providers should evaluate the possibility of offering wholesale products to other retail service providers to increase network penetration. This allows the total cost of ownership to be amortized across a larger number of end users.
Recommendations for governments, regulators and policymakers:
• Share what you can spare. Sharing existing public infrastructures, such as utility ducts, trenches and poles, can help accelerate the rollout of FTTP. Public stakeholders, includ-ing municipalities, governments and policymakers, should explore ways that public infrastructures and rights-of-way can be made available to all parties interested in deploying fiber networks.
• Facilitate collaboration among stakeholders. Regulators and poli-cymakers at all levels of public ad-ministration facilitate cooperation between access providers and rights-of-way holders. Collaboration can improve market dynamics, enhance competition and avert potential mo-nopolistic practices.
• Get the financing in place and on time. One common shortcom-ing of public funding is that all the funds are typically made available at the start of the project. As a result, publicly backed projects start out cash-rich but do not necessarily have financing in place to support later phases. The timing of public financ-ing needs to match the progressive nature of network deployment and cover all phases of network develop-ment and service marketing.
• Don’t neglect the backhaul market. Backhaul is a prerequisite for the de-velopment of FTTP networks, and public policymakers should ensure that backhaul links are available at competitive prices. This can be ac-complished either by appropriate regulation of the backhaul market or by channeling a portion of FTTP stimulus funds to the development of national interconnection infra-structure and exchange facilities. v
In 2006, the FCC established the Rural Health Care Pilot Program to encourage health care providers that
serve rural communities – including some urban hub sites – to develop and use broadband networks. The agency drew funding from the Universal Ser-vice Fund (USF); the Universal Ser-vice Administrative Company, which administers all USF programs, admin-isters this one as well. Program partici-pants can receive up to 85 percent of the costs of constructing networks, install-ing advanced services and connecting to the public Internet and to Internet2 or National LambdaRail (two backbone networks that connect research and edu-cational networks nationwide).
The FCC aimed to increase rural Americans’ access to health care by al-lowing rural clinics to tap the expertise of modern urban medical centers. Con-necting to urban hub sites would give patients access to care that was unavail-able in their own communities – from cardiologists, pediatricians, radiologists, intensive-care specialists and others – without leaving their communities or, in some cases, their homes.
Such networks, the commission rea-soned, could deliver services efficiently, reduce patients’ costs and travel time, decrease medical errors and enable health care providers to share critical in-formation. In addition, they could help implement electronic health records sys-tems and coordinate responses to public health emergencies.
The following year, the FCC re-viewed applications for the program and
committed $417 million to 69 entities to build networks. These entities repre-sented more than 6,000 public and non-profit health care providers – hospitals, clinics, universities, research centers, be-havioral health sites, correctional facility clinics and community health centers.
Several of these projects later merged, and several others withdrew or failed to meet FCC deadlines. Today, 50 projects are active and in various stages of com-pletion. The FCC is considering how to transition them to the primary rural health care program, a USF-funded pro-gram that supports ongoing telecom-munications costs for rural health care providers.
Because the 69 original projects were designed to address specific local prob-lems, they diverged widely in terms of size, scope and approach. Some created entirely new networks, and others up-graded existing networks. Some focused on particular populations – seniors, for example – or on particular types of health care providers, such as mental
health clinics; others cast a wider net. The types of applications differed as well. Some projects emphasized data ex-change, and others emphasized real-time video consultations with specialists.
State laws and regulations also ac-counted for some of the differences among projects. In some states, for ex-ample, rural health networks were pro-hibited from having access to rights-of-way along state highways or utility poles to build a network.
a Tale oF THree NeTWorks At the BroadBand Communities Sum-mit in April, leaders of three of the larger projects – the Rural Nebraska Healthcare Network (RNHN), the Health Information Exchange of Mon-tana (HIEM) and the Illinois Rural HealthNet (IRHN) – told their stories and compared notes about challenges, progress and achievements. (RNHN was profiled in the March-April issue of BroadBand Communities.) The session was moderated by Joel Mulder, senior di-rector of business development for G4S
Broadband Transforms Rural Health CareThree grantees in the FCC Rural Health Care Pilot Program revealed the challenges and rewards of bringing fiber connectivity to rural health providers.
By Masha Zager ■ Broadband Communities
about the authorMasha Zager is the editor of BroadBand Communities. You can reach her at [email protected].
G4S Technology, the construction firm involved in all three networks, was instrumental in finding
The FCC Rural Health Care Pilot Program is funding 50 advanced networks designed to
improve health care in rural regions of the United States. Most are now nearing completion.
Technology, the design and construc-tion firm that was involved in all three projects. (This article includes follow-up information from some participants.)
Rural health care providers face a common set of problems, Mulder pointed out. They and their patients have limited resources, and they are of-ten called upon to provide health care that cannot be billed or reimbursed, such as emergency services for seasonal workers.
Because most rural hospitals and clinics are not served by fiber-based in-frastructure, the bandwidth available for current and future applications is severely limited. Even when bandwidth is available, it is often cost prohibitive. Mulder said one hospital commented that putting X-ray films in an ambulance with a patient was easier than trying to transmit the images electronically.
Poor, costly or nonexistent broad-band access limits hospitals’ ability to use technology to reduce costs or en-hance quality of care. It also makes at-tracting medical personnel to rural areas extremely difficult. Doctors looking to move to rural areas are more inclined to establish themselves and practice in localities where advanced technology is available to better serve their patients.
At the same time, these hospitals and clinics play a critical role in keeping ru-ral communities viable. Like school sys-tems in many rural communities, they provide cornerstones for jobs and eco-nomic viability. When they close, pa-tients must drive for hours to see doctors – and often don’t get the care they need. A hospital’s closing can easily begin a downward spiral for a community. Few people want to move to or locate a busi-ness in an area where health care is un-available, and older residents may have to leave the homes they have lived in all their lives if they need regular access to medical care. Conversely, if a hospital or clinic can remain open and even up-grade its technology, residents and po-tential residents feel reassured that the community will continue to exist.
MaTcHING FUNDsRaising the 15 percent match for project funds may have been the pilot program’s
most challenging requirement. Though recipients didn’t have to identify the sources of their matches before getting awards, they had to arrange financing before USF funds could be released.
Of the three networks discussed in the session, IRHN had the easiest time finding matching funds – at least for the backbone network. Because its project is closely aligned with two stimulus-funded middle-mile networks, one of which is administered by the Illinois Department of Central Management Services, the state of Illinois provided the necessary 15 percent match for the backbone network. Each provider had to supply its own matching funds for its connections to the backbone net-work. These were raised from a variety of sources.
The Nebraska and Montana net-works, which did not receive state funding, had to find matching funds for their entire projects. Initially, they hoped to use in-kind services for the match – RNHN from a telecom part-ner and HIEM from member organiza-
tions – but the FCC rejected these plans and insisted on cash contributions. Nor could they generate revenues by con-necting other customers to their net-works, because the pilot program rules require grant recipients to use their net-works exclusively for health care. (Some network builders characterize this exclu-sive approach as inefficient and likely to inhibit rural broadband by siphoning off potential anchor tenants.)
Fortunately, however, the FCC per-mits grant recipients to generate revenue by leasing dark fiber. Because the Ne-braska and Montana projects built new fiber backbones, they could include extra fibers for little additional cost.
G4S Technology helped them bring in private partners that leased these dedicated fibers for commercial net-works. “Our company has a long history of working with telecommunications companies in the shared resource mar-ket,” said Mulder. “We are well known for our ability to match their needs with these types of new builds.” In fact, one reason G4S Technology was selected as the construction partner for these proj-ects was its ability to bring additional parties into the process.
The RNHN private partner is middle- mile network operator Zayo Group. G4S Technology, which had previously built and maintained networks for Zayo, ap-proached Zayo with the thought that the partnership would benefit all par-ties. Zayo could obtain fiber for much less than the cost of building it – which, Mulder said, “would allow [Zayo] to expand its footprint and … enhance broadband and middle-mile services in all these communities.” He added, “They were very receptive.” Zayo also secured a contract to maintain RNHN’s outside plant – an efficient arrangement because any fiber cut or other damage to the
outside plant would likely affect both Zayo’s and RNHN’s cable.
According to Boni Carrell, RNHN’s executive director, “It took us 11 months to come up with [a funding source] the FCC would accept. They said we could add privately funded excess capacity as long as it didn’t cost us any extra money to install. Zayo’s prepayment for the ex-cess capacity (48 fibers, compared with the 36 fibers RNHN uses) was put into an escrow account and counted for our 15 percent share.” Any additional pay-ments from Zayo beyond the 15 percent, Carrell said, will go toward network maintenance.
HIEM received a cash contribution from one of its project partners, the Uni-
versity of Montana, but the bulk of its match came from long-term dark fiber leases to several carriers. “We benefited from the Nebraska experience,” said Kip Smith, executive director of HIEM.
bUIlDING THe NeTWorks Once the matching funds were secured, all three projects had to meet aggressive timetables set by the FCC.
The projects’ approaches to network building were based on the availability of fiber and on the distances between their health care facilities. HIEM and RNHN, which were originally T1-based, had to build new fiber networks. IRHN – which had the greatest access to middle-mile fiber as well as the longest distances between facilities – did not build a fiber backbone but leased a com-bination of dark fiber, wavelengths and wholesale bandwidth. It entered into 20-year leases so the project would be sustainable after the FCC funding ran out. Fiber laterals or point-to-point wire-less connections are being built from the backbone to each health care facility.
Leasing backbone fiber was ulti-mately much less expensive for IRHN than building it, but getting there wasn’t easy. According to Doug Power of the Northern Illinois University Broadband Development Group, one of the leaders
in planning and implementing IRHN, though the organization’s RFP specified the amount of money available (about $24 million altogether), one proposer quoted $347 million for dark fiber. “It took a couple of rounds for the vendors to understand what was happening,” Power said. “You have to convince them you’re not kidding.”
Between middle-mile fiber, last-mile fiber, wireless equipment, optical equip-ment, a network operations center and other elements of the network, IRHN contracted with 10 vendors, which the NIU Broadband Development Group oversees. The backbone network is now in place and a number of laterals are completed. Other laterals, however, re-main to be built because some health care providers are still seeking matching funds. Funding must be secured soon if these institutions are to take advantage of the pilot program.
HIEM, like IRHN, was obliged by timing constraints to issue multiple RFPs – one for engineering, three for construction, one for temporary leased services and one for electronics. The net-work is in the engineering phase now, and construction will begin shortly. Smith said local carriers resisted the idea of the network, saying that plenty of fi-
The Health Information exchange of Montana was initiated by five inde-pendently owned and operated hospitals and two federally funded com-munity health centers in northwestern and north central Montana. To store and exchange basic patient medical information and to expand applications such as remote consultation, disaster readiness, clinical research and distance education services, the group is building a new fiber network to connect nine facilities. The new network, which received a $13.6 million grant from the FCC, will also serve as a connection point to Internet2 or National LambdaRail.
Kip Smith, HIEM
The rural Nebraska Healthcare Network is a consortium of rural hospi-tals and related clinics that has coordinated a unified health care system for western Nebraska since 1996. With the help of a $19.3 million FCC grant, the consortium upgraded its patchwork of T1 lines to an advanced fiber network that spans 12 western Nebraska counties, connects nine primary care hos-pitals and dozens of affiliated health care clinics, and provides access to the National LambdaRail and Internet2 research networks. The new network pro-vides speeds of up to 1 Gbps for a variety of telehealth and telemedicine ser-vices in an underserved rural area. Boni Carrell, RNHN
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SUMMit coverageber and bandwidth were already avail-able, and they did not respond to the RFPs. “They were all waiting for us to fail,” he said. “But once they determined that we would do it, they got coopera-tive, and now they have partnered with us for excess capacity. Some of them be-came good partners.”
The final 140-mile leg of HIEM’s net-work is being built in collaboration with a BTOP stimulus project. Smith said, “We worked out an arrangement where we built half of the network, they built half, and we lease dark fiber back from each other. It’s not easy; even though the two federal programs have similar intent, they have different rules. But it results in a much improved infrastructure at a fraction of the total cost. Partnership and collaboration are critical.”
RNHN was able to issue a single RFP, and it contracted with G4S Tech-nology to deliver a turnkey system. Construction of the 750-mile fiber optic network began two years ago. The proj-ect was fully completed in July 2012, with the governor of Nebraska presiding over a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
applIcaTIoNs The most bandwidth-intensive applica-tions in health care today – those that benefit the most from the availability of high-speed networks – are remote con-sultations with doctors or other special-ists, transmission of medical images and centralization of medical records.
For IRHN, transmitting medical images is the key application. Power said that fiber access allows hospitals to send images to radiologists immediately, instead of waiting for off-peak hours, and reduces the time to send a CT scan from four hours to a few seconds. “We can get diagnoses done by a specialist in an urban area while patients are still in the hospital – we don’t have to bring them back. Strokes can be diagnosed and treated at rural hospitals without patients’ having to be transported.”
In addition to sending medical im-ages, Power said, another important application is patient consultation with medical professionals. “Psychiatry and psychology services don’t exist in some areas,” he explained. “Now we can treat people remotely.”
For HIEM, the key application was electronic health information exchange – making patient medical records avail-able anywhere throughout the region. Though broadband was “an after-thought” for the organization, accord-ing to Smith, member hospitals even-tually discovered that sharing medical records at low bandwidth was ineffi-cient. Physicians spent too much time entering information into the system. Transitioning from T1 lines to fiber ac-cess will give them “a new hour in their day,” Smith said.
Now that broadband will be avail-able at 100 Mbps or higher speeds, HIEM members are beginning to think about medical imaging and telehealth.
“By creating the infrastructure, we’ll re-move a big barrier to the ability to offer services in the region,” Smith said, add-ing that the network will allow “access to quality care without having to travel 80 to 100 miles over mountain passes.”
RNHN’s major initiative to date has been teletrauma. According to Car-rell, eight critical access hospitals now have teletrauma systems. When a criti-cally injured patient arrives at one of them, she says, the access hospital and the hub hospital each turns on a cam-era, and “the consulting physician at the hub hospital can view the patient and guide the critical access hospital, which is staffed mostly by physician assistants and nurse practitioners.”
ecoNoMIc DeVelopMeNT The rural health networks are making a difference to their communities in two ways: both directly in terms of keeping their communities viable and by bring-ing fiber that can be used for other pur-poses into communities.
RNHN has already helped Nebraska health care providers recruit young doc-tors, which keeps its hospitals at the cut-ting edge and makes communities more attractive. The fiber dedicated to Zayo is helping, too. A local newspaper recently called fiber optic cable Nebraska’s “new money crop.” Two local Internet ser-vice providers are already making use of Zayo’s fiber to provide last-mile con-nectivity. “Stay tuned to see what will happen,” Carrell said. v
The Illinois rural HealthNet consortium is building a statewide fiber optic network to serve approximately 87 health care facilities and connect to In-ternet2. More than 95 percent of connected locations will have connectivity at speeds ranging from 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps. Consortium members include Northern Illinois University, the state of Illinois and the Illinois Critical Access Hospital Network, among others. The consortium received a $21.1 million grant from the FCC.Doug Power, IRHN
The networks are expected to improve rural economies as well as health. A local paper called
fiber optics Nebraska’s “new money crop.”
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“Bringing fiber into a multiple-dwell-ing-unit (MDU) property is one of the toughest things the industry has seen in a long time,” Mark Boxer, applica-tions engineering manager for OFS, said in the Summit’s Vendor/Audience Roundtable on Inside-Plant Challenges. He identified tight spaces as the biggest challenge MDUs pose. “You have to go around doorframes and in hallways,” he said. “There are unmanaged bends; you don’t have the same latitude as in the outside plant, where you can control where everything goes. You need fiber that will actually make it there. Opti-cal losses go up as the bends get tighter, and that problem is going to get tougher because the next generation of fiber to the home will use longer wavelengths. If you deploy a system today and you don’t deploy the proper type of fiber, you can’t upgrade to the next generation. The so-lution is bend-insensitive fiber.”
Jay Borer, global business manager for 3M Communication Markets Di-vision, cited another common MDU challenge: hallway aesthetics. “Why do I need a large raceway if fiber is so small?” he asked. 3M worked with Veri-zon to find a more aesthetically pleasing solution and came up with the One Pass Fiber Pathway. The size of a pencil, the One Pass runs almost invisibly down a building hallway; an even smaller form factor of the product is available for use inside apartments. “Now you can bring fiber to an outlet or to an optical net-work terminal (ONT) in a way that’s unnoticeable to a tenant,” Borer said.
Erik Gronvall, manager of product management for TE Connectivity, noted that the challenges of tight spaces and aesthetics combined to created a third challenge: unpredictable design varia-tions. “You might have to put a product in a 5-foot by 5-foot space or in an air ducting system.… I can’t tell you today what I’m going to need, so the product has to be able to be configured on site.”
Small MDU buildings have spe-cial challenges because they have even fewer pathways for cables than high-rise buildings. “If cable pathways are too congested, you can use microduct,” Borer said, “but that takes much time and labor. The One Pass Fiber Pathway is a possibility or square latch molding with individual drop cables. If you put the ONT in the living room, it’s much easier to mount.”
Inside wiring sometimes ends up on the outside wall if risers are full or un-available. “You can start at the top or the bottom,” Boxer explained, “and run the cable down the side of the building, put-ting individual drop bundles at the win-dow spacings. This is one of the fastest, least expensive ways to install fiber. The downside is that it’s ugly.” Many prod-ucts are available to disguise fiber on an
outside wall. Usually, the finished prod-uct looks like a downspout or a window treatment.
WHY rUN FIber To THe UNIT?If retrofitting fiber to individual liv-ing units is such a challenge, one au-dience member asked, why not simply put ONTs in building basements and use existing copper wiring to reach the units? Gronvall explained that ser-vice providers can’t always determine whether the existing copper will support the services they want to offer.
Boxer added that ONTs made for installation in apartment units are less expensive than outdoor ONTs because they do not require environmental pro-tection. Because technicians can now provision and troubleshoot ONTs re-motely, there is no longer any need to place ONTs in accessible places (base-ments, outside walls), so “there’s a strong move toward indoors.”
According to Borer, many deployers that once adopted fiber-to-the-basement strategies, such as China Telecom, are now migrating to FTTH for more reli-able service. Verizon, which used eight-unit ONTs (generally one per floor) when it began MDU deployments in
Building Networks That WorkFor apartment communities and rural communities, for wired networks and wireless networks, customer satisfaction was a common theme at BroadBand Communities Summit 2012. Networks must be designed and operated with a view to meeting customers’ needs, today and in the future.
A BBC Staff Report
Tight spaces, concerns about aesthetics and unpredictable building designs are among the
New York City, switched to individual ONTs because copper wiring was prob-lematic. “There were so many issues in the quality level of Cat 3 fiber, and so much troubleshooting involved, that it was easier to bring fiber to the unit,” he said. (Some newer apartment buildings have reliable Cat 5e fiber or new coaxial cable running to the units.)
Moderator Steve Ross pointed out that even when copper inside wiring is adequate for home broadband and video, it may not be reliable enough for additional services that building owners want to install, such as telehealth for el-derly residents. Certifying the reliability of fiber for critical services is much more feasible than certifying copper.
WHaT IF FIber caN’T be rUN To THe UNIT?Running fiber to individual building units may not always be possible. For example, some building owners may refuse permission to install it. In this case, Gronvall said, using an indoor dis-tributed antenna system (DAS) to sup-port wireless broadband may be a good solution.
In most cases, however, the “impossi-ble” turns out to be possible because ven-dors are able to develop customized, cre-ative solutions. New technologies, such as preconnectorized multifiber assem-blies, have enabled a host of new designs because they allow deployers to fit more connections into tighter spaces. The presenters encouraged service provid-ers and building owners to ask vendors how they would accommodate a tricky MDU situation. “If you have a strange scenario, you’re not the only one,” Boxer said. “The only way we learn is by hear-ing what those problems are.”
Not too long ago, wireless broadband inside MDUs was a nice amenity, David Daugherty, CEO of Korcett Holdings, said in his introduction to the Summit’s Metrics session. However, the prolif-eration of wireless devices – especially in
student housing – has brought wireless access to the fore. “The demands on wire-less spectrum in dense housing are enor-mous and challenging,” Daugherty said.
Phillip Emer, technology direc-tor of the Preiss Company, a property owner, emphasized that wired and wire-less broadband were complementary rather than competing. “Do we need wires? Absolutely. Wired is better,” he said. “But the reality is that university students arrive with their iThings and MacThings. The next MacBook won’t even have an Ethernet port. iPads al-ready don’t. Many properties deliver Ethernet to the pillow, and then the students all bring their own rogue ac-cess points. It doesn’t matter how much bandwidth there is – there’s still lots of interference. Whether property owners deliver the wireless service or not, they still have to deal with it because they get the phone calls.”
UNloaD oNTo THe WIreD NeTWork Because of interference issues, network designers should unload wireless sig-nals onto an MDU’s wired network as quickly as possible, advised Richard Holtz, CEO of InfiniSys Electronic Ar-chitects. “Owners will find that if they can’t unload their wireless networks, they won’t have happy residents,” he said, citing a Louisiana property whose owners spent more than $1,000 per unit on a wireless network that will provide only a temporary fix.
Holtz added, “The new Wi-Fi stan-dard, 802.11ac, is coming soon. The bandwidth is huge, and the standard doesn’t work well in high-density hous-ing. It will support wireless TV, but mul-tifamily owners can’t afford to do that, so they’re attaching their own TVs to their wired networks. High-definition IP cameras for security can also use a lot
Challenges of Providing Wireless Broadband in MDUs
Three vendor representatives answered audience questions about the challenges of wiring MDUs
with fiber. All said they could customize solutions.
of your backbone. They can actually see faces and license plate numbers.”
Several technical approaches are possible for wireless networks in MDUs, but Holtz’s preferred solution is to use a large number of low-power radios placed close to one another so no signal has to travel far before being transferred to the wired network, preferably fiber. “Some people say you should use high-power radios,” he commented, “but there are only x number of channels available on a radio. With a smaller number of high-power radios, you’ll get lots of bars of coverage but no bandwidth.”
Holtz added, “The reality is that wireless service isn’t free. A less expen-
sive solution may work this year, but it won’t work next year.” In luxury proper-ties, he said, usage levels are extremely high “because people move there for the amenities.” Bandwidth in luxury hous-ing may have to be twice as high as in student housing (400 Kbps/resident compared with 200 Kbps/resident) be-fore complaints will stop.
WIreless For bUIlDING operaTIoNs The proliferation of wireless devices – not only residents’ devices but build-ing management devices that owners install – is complicating the design of wireless networks. Charles Flynn, chief
operating officer at Korcett Holdings, described a recent Korcett project where the owner’s design requirements failed to include the wireless devices for track-ing power usage. “We turned up the net-work, and it was much weaker than we expected,” Flynn said. “We got a lot of support calls.” The owner spent $75,000 to deactivate and send back the power-monitoring devices, and the damage to the property’s reputation was consider-able. Daugherty cited a similar instance involving wireless thermostats that used a ZigBee mesh network.
Holtz explained that ZigBee operates in the same frequency ranges – 2.4 and 5 GHz – as today’s Wi-Fi devices. “The fewer devices you have running wireless for property operations, the better off you are,” he said. “Better to spend $10,000 to $15,000 running a wire to an Ethernet switch and run these devices wired. Zig-Bee is great in houses but not in dense housing. And Z-Wave [an alternative standard to ZigBee] has similar prob-
Wireless networks can quickly become congested unless signals are offloaded to the wired
“Networks sometimes get sick,” said Gary Evans, president and CEO of Hi-awatha Broadband Communications (HBC), and Milda Hedblom, a connec-tivity consultant for the company. Be-cause HBC, a competitive provider that builds and manages FTTH networks in southeastern Minnesota, is known for its high take rates and excellent customer service, newer entrants to the field, in-cluding municipal providers, often ask the company for help and advice.
Just like medical doctors, network doctors Evans and Hedblom believe an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. At the Summit, they dispensed the following advice to fiber overbuilders (to be taken with a grain of salt, according to Hedblom):
• Compete on services, not on price. If you compete on price, you will lose because entrenched incumbents have deeper pockets than new en-trants. Instead, choose differentia-
tors that your competition can’t or won’t match – for example, customer service. Call new customers to thank them for their business. Call them after service calls to make sure ev-erything has been attended to. The
prebuild frenzy, as busy as it is, is the most important time to focus on what potential customers are saying. Pay attention even to little things, such as complaints about having to learn a new channel lineup. Give
“In a lot of cases, people say the asset has a good design, but I look under the hood and see
lems. If you try to run your gates wire-lessly, you’ll mess up everything else.”
IF IT DoesN’T MoVe, WIre ITEmer added, “In general, if it doesn’t move and it needs to be connected, wire is a good thing and cheaper. The desk phone, the refrigerator, the thermostat – anything that’s bolted to a wall – just run a cable to it.” The same applies to building systems such as fire panels and elevators, which once required proprie-tary hardware and software but now can be operated on standard data networks.
“Wireless is hard to manage,” Emer said. “The problem may be someone do-ing something in a building next door to you. Most of it is out of your control.… No one wants to provide a service-level agreement for wireless, but users don’t know that. As far as they’re concerned, the Internet access doesn’t work.”
For a property owner to offer wire-less service, its infrastructure and sup-port models must be designed to allow
for new devices to be added in an orderly fashion. “I think Verizon and AT&T should pay me to let them do wireless on my property,” Emer said.
“Let’s be honest with ourselves,” Holtz responded. “Provider x offers to put in a wireless system for free, and then it all blows up. The owner sells the property, and the problem ends up with the next owner. In a lot of cases, people say the asset has a good design, but I look under the hood and see Band-Aids in place. I know it will collapse next year.
“We know today that Internet speeds are going up 10 percent to 20 percent per year. The ideal speed is what’s rep-
resented by TV – that’s what people expect from whatever device they’re on. So we need a design that’s good and sustainable over time. One property I can think of tried to do everything with wireless. Residents brought in their own cable modems and their own access points, and the owner had to retrofit the building with fiber at 10 times the cost.”
Emer agreed, saying, “If you’re going to go all wireless, you need a rock-solid infrastructure. If tenants don’t have the option of cable, then their phones be-come rogue hot spots, and they com-plain that the wireless infrastructure doesn’t work.”
Gary Evans, CEO of Hiawatha Broadband Communications, is frequently called for consultation by operators of struggling fiber networks.
them one less reason not to switch to your service.
• Mobilize the community. You can never have enough helpers, so reach out and get them. This is critical for new networks, but it’s a prescription for the health of established networks as well, particularly if you’re battling competition. Look for people who are well known in your area and who are respected by the classes they rep-resent (different age groups, etc.).
• Take a community fitness test. Do you have the critical capital you need, such as political will, leadership and economic resources? Understand what your community needs, what services already exist and what its po-tential is for economic development.
• Do a business reality check. Study market conditions closely – don’t just rely on your hopes and estimates. Adopt goals that fit the community.
• Recruit specialists for planning, de-sign, engineering, finance, rollout strategy and other components of your deployment. Make sure these experts educate community leaders. Many networks built on the strength of emotionalism are now struggling because this education didn’t take place. For example, one community built a fiber-rich network, and then its municipal electric utility built a second fiber network for a smart grid. Community leaders need to understand that a fiber network can and should serve multiple purposes.
• Develop sound business and opera-tional plans that you can speak con-vincingly about. Be ready to respond to misrepresentations and to correct distortions when needed. The big broadband story is optimistic in the long term, but you need to explain that in the short term, the network must repay its costs.
• When customers precommit to buy services, it’s a sign that they believe in the network and will help repay the costs of building it. Investors are very interested to know about the strength of community interest and the community’s willingness to pay.
• Promote applications that resonate with area residents. For an older de-mographic, gaming will not be a big selling point, but telehealth might be.
• Find a general manager from the lo-cal market if at all possible. The GM must understand the plan and the finances and have great people skills – it’s a tough job because a GM must stay close to what’s happening with-out micromanaging. Recruit other key people locally, too, and hire them early enough to train them ad-equately before the rollout. To help train your people, find a similar company that uses best practices.
• Open a local office to establish presence and visibility. It should be in a location suitable for provid-ing service, and the interior must be friendly. One project we worked with had a customer service office
that looked more like a city jail! In Winona [HBC’s headquarters and first network location], our office was designed by employees to be friendly and inviting and to enable discus-sion. It has a living room area where customers can watch TV, eat cook-ies and drink coffee. If you make customers feel welcome, they will produce customer after customer for you by talking to their neighbors.
• Hold a community dinner to intro-duce yourselves. Hire local restau-rants to provide the food, invite the community and have people sign up for service. In one community, we had 65 percent signed up before we began to build the network. In big-ger communities, hold neighborhood barbecues and hire local caterers.
• Once the network is up and run-ning, develop indicators to measure success and manage to the indica-tors. React immediately to anoma-lies because if you stumble, your competitors will react quickly. Is there an unusual outage pattern? Can customer complaints give you a tip about what’s wrong?
• Develop good processes and monitor them closely. Don’t let excess costs creep in.
• Keep the business plan updated, es-pecially if large, unforeseen events occur.
• You may not need to offer a tra-ditional video package, which is expensive and hard to sell in the current environment. Assume no practice is sacred.
• If major changes are needed, refi-nancing may be possible. Investors may accept altered terms to preserve long-term operation. Seek specialist help!
• Always remember why you started the network in the first place. If there have been benefits to the com-munity, it isn’t a bad idea to remind your constituency why you did it and what happened as a result.
• If you need help and advice, reach out to another network operator who’s been in a similar situation. v
Pay attention to what customers tell you – don’t give them a reason not to use your service. Call them to make sure their problems are resolved.
Milda Hedblom, consultant to HBC
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Not long ago, Pennsylvania was one of only a few states without a research and education network
– a serious problem for its educational institutions in general and particularly for those in the state’s 22 remote, under-served counties. As soon as the broad-band stimulus program was announced, state educators saw an opportunity to remedy that lack. Seven large univer-sities, along with a number of associa-tions that represent educational, health care and research institutions, quickly formed a coalition they called the Key-stone Initiative for Network Based Edu-cation and Research, or KINBER, and began planning a network.
In 2010, the National Telecommuni-cations and Information Administration awarded KINBER $99.7 million – the sixth largest broadband stimulus grant – to build the 1,600-mile Pennsylvania Research and Education Network, or PennREN. PennREN will deliver com-petitively priced networking services to universities, colleges, K–12 schools, libraries, public media organizations, health care organizations and other an-chor institutions.
Nearly 70 Pennsylvania institutions are slated to be connected directly to the fiber optic network with broadband speeds of between 10 Mbps and 10 Gbps; many more will be close enough to the network to connect to it through their last-mile providers. In fact, according to the NTIA, PennREN will be able to
offer wholesale services to last-mile pro-viders that will enhance broadband ac-cess for more than 2 million households, more than 200,000 businesses and nearly 1,700 additional anchor institutions.
Jeff Reel, executive director of KIN-BER, explains, “We’ve had active con-versations with a number of last-mile providers. … The ones we’ve had the op-portunity to sit down and talk with are interested and willing to engage with us as an opportunity to provide additional capabilities to the people they already serve. If they have a customer that is a library or health care provider, now [that institution] can tie into our state-wide resource to meet other members of the same group.” In addition, Reel says, KINBER will be able to provide back-haul for services such as mobile data that
might not have been economically pos-sible to deliver in those areas before.
cross-secTor collaboraTIoNIn addition to providing high-speed con-nectivity to the Internet and to Internet2 (the national research and education network), PennREN will help member institutions work collaboratively across sectors – for example, by allowing a hospital to participate in a university research study or by giving high school students a chance to take college courses or use specialized library resources.
Bruce Taggart, vice provost for li-brary and technology services at Lehigh University and one of the project found-ers, commented at the time the grant was awarded, “PennREN is not a ‘Band-Aid project.’ It will have a lasting impact on
A Research Network Grows in PennsylvaniaThanks to a broadband stimulus grant, anchor institutions across Pennsylvania will be able to connect and collaborate using a statewide research and education network. Tight integration between network layers makes the network flexible and cost-efficient.
The new Pennsylvania Research and Education Network will link 70 educational institutions,
research centers, health care providers and other institutions across the state – and allow many more to connect through last-mile providers.
By Masha Zager ■ Broadband Communities
about the authorMasha Zager is the editor of BroadBand Communities. You can reach her at [email protected].
MiddLe-MiLe NetWorKS generations of Pennsylvanians by provid-ing a statewide broadband technology infrastructure that allows Pennsylvania to grow and prosper in the 21st century.” Taggart said that Lehigh, which is a core node in the new network, will benefit in the fields of data-intensive research, high-performance computing, videocon-ferencing, telemedicine, collaboration with international students and faculty and real-time access to remote resources.
According to Reel, “The network will provide the foundation for collaboration among health care, education, libraries, public schools, municipalities and pub-lic safety organizations. All those groups feel they do not have the broadband capabilities they need to perform their missions. All the entities are anxiously awaiting the increased capabilities their institutions will be able to perfom.”
TecHNoloGY cHoIcesThe contract for engineering, design and construction of PennREN’s out-side plant was awarded to Sunesys and Blair Park Services, both subsidiaries of Quanta Services. Sunesys provided $24 million in matching funds for the proj-ect, and in return it will receive right-of-way access on the PennREN network.
GlobalNOC, the Global Research Network Operations Center at Indi-ana University, was chosen to provide network operations services, help desk
services and engineering support for PennREN. GlobalNOC provides these services for I-Light, Indiana’s research and education network, and a number of similar networks and has developed net-work management software specifically for research and education networks.
KINBER made a strategic technol-ogy choice in awarding a contract to TorreyPoint Group, a consultant and in-tegrator, to engineer and install network equipment from Juniper Networks and ADVA Optical Networking. TorreyPoint proposed, as a turnkey solution, an inte-grated packet optical network. This ap-proach uses Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) technology to integrate wave, metro Ethernet and traditional Layer 3 services into a single, cohesive system. Juniper provides the routing and switching equipment, along with its JUNOS network operating sys-tem; ADVA Optical Networking pro-vides its FSP 3000 optical transmission equipment. Thirteen sites are designated
as add/drop nodes, and there are an ad-ditional 56 access nodes at universities, hospitals and research centers.
One reason the TorreyPoint pro-posal appealed to KINBER is that Ju-niper and ADVA, which have a strategic partnership, had already integrated their equipment control planes so thoroughly that Juniper routers can not only talk to the ADVA FSP 3000s but also control them. JUNOS can actually reconfigure the transport network as needed to best route packets, based on information ac-quired from the ADVA transport gear across a GMPLS UNI interface.
Jim Theodoras, senior director of technical marketing at ADVA Optical Networking, explains that ADVA de-cided to better integrate its control plane with routers precisely because nontradi-tional network operators such as KIN-BER are becoming more prevalent.
“Most of these networks grow out of campus LANs run by an IT depart-ment,” he says, explaining that IT de-partments tend to be expert in using routers but not necessarily in architect-ing and maintaining optical transport networks, which can involve manag-ing wavelengths, link budgets, disper-sion compensation, amplifier noise and configuration rules. “Fortune 100 com-panies, research and education institu-tions, health care providers – they’re all forming co-ops and coalitions and ty-ing their campuses together with fiber. But now they can’t just plug routers to-gether; they have to deal with transport, and that’s a new skill set.
“The options are either to hand ev-erything over to a traditional service provider, or to ‘do it yourself ’ with the help of integrators, consultants and NOC services, and many are choosing the latter. So we make the transport layer act like a simple extension of the
Health care providers will be able to collaborate more easily with university researchers, and
high school students will be able to take college courses and access specialized resources.
familiar routing management system. Network engineers provision a path in the router domain between two IP ad-dresses, just as if the two routers were sitting next to one another in the same room, and the transport gear automati-cally gets provisioned to set up a link between the routers.”
A key factor in KINBER’s decision, according to Theodoras, was the abil-ity of the Juniper routers to control the transport layer. “They needed a flexible transport network because there aren’t enough resources to let everyone have dedicated bandwidth everywhere, all the time. They had to have a dynamic
reservation system so institutions on the network could reserve the bandwidth they needed and pay for only what they need when they need it. When they saw that the transport solution ran itself and they would just have to manage the routers, that was a huge thing for them.
“Their people would be more effi-cient, and there were power savings, too. As the routers see changes in bandwidth demand or requests, the ROADMs [reconfigurable optical add/drop mul-tiplexers, or optical transport devices] reconfigure themselves in real time to set up and tear down new circuits in seconds rather than weeks or months.
Hence, the network can get by with fewer fiber pairs on long-haul routes.”
Reel confirms, “We needed hard-ware that spanned the gamut from op-tical hardware to the Ethernet hand-off, and we looked for an integrated solution.” The ADVA/Juniper solution, which he calls a “holistic, integrated solution,” was the easiest to maintain and operate, was based on mature and established technology, and will support the network into the foreseeable future. “Having a GMPLS control plane allows us to operate and provision the network easily as we grow,” he says, adding that ADVA’s technology roadmap will allow PennREN to deploy parts of the net-work at 100 Gbps.
KINBER is on track to meet its 2013 deadline for completion of PennREN, with large portions of the network al-ready completed and the first sections having gone live in August. “Broadband is a critical infrastructure that’s lacking in Pennsylvania, and we’re excited to be able to provide that,” Reel says. v
TorreyPoint’s integrated solution automates provisioning of the optical transport equipment.
New circuits are automatically set up and torn down in real time to meet changes in demand.
A subsidiary ofMillenniuMCoMMuniCations Group inC.
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clearly defining and quantifying a causal link between high-speed broadband and economic de-
velopment is challenging. Few, if any, businesses locate in an area just because it has high-speed broadband; location, incentives, workforce and other issues also play significant roles. A new study of economic development efforts and needs in Appalachia, commissioned by the Appalachian Regional Commission and conducted by a research team at the University of Tennessee, sheds light on the role broadband plays in economic development there, but it still leaves many questions unanswered.
The researchers – one of whom, Eric Ogle, I met at the BroadBand Com-munities Summit last spring – studied 10 Appalachian counties in eight states from Pennsylvania to Mississippi. They noted, “During our travels and discus-sions, we witnessed firsthand the para-dox that often defines Appalachia: The region is one of great beauty and a wealth of resources, yet remains burdened with
Broadband and Economic Development in AppalachiaAn important new study by researchers at the University of Tennessee sheds light on broadband and economic development but raises many new questions.
pockets of poverty and privation. We also noted the vast gains made by the re-gion in the past half century and remain optimistic that Appalachia will reach its just potential.
“Unlike prior studies, which relied heavily on quantitative methods, this study also makes use of extensive quali-tative tools and approaches. Project re-searchers surveyed community members, conducted site visits and conducted inter-views and focus groups with stakeholders to learn more about local efforts, policies and perceptions. As a result, this report adds a local voice to the discussion of de-velopment efforts and results in a broad assessment of economic conditions at the community level.” This mixed methodol-
ogy provides readers with two different types of information to consider – and makes the report very interesting.
The study is extremely wide-ranging. The researchers offer compelling find-ings and recommendations about how regional economic development initia-tives affect and are perceived by local organizations and individuals, about youth, health, underutilized industrial parks, ways to use social media, how be-lief systems impact economic develop-ment and a host of other concerns. They
Residents of Appalachia have many pressing social and economic problems,
exacerbated by the lack of broadband access.
By Ken Demlow ■ NewCom Technologies
about the authorKen Demlow is the national business development manager for NewCom Technologies, which performs engineering services and network data management, including GIS plant mapping and smart-grid deployment, for the telecommunications industry. You can reach him at [email protected] or 765-366-8370.
about the reportThe complete report by Tim Ezzell, Dayton Lambert, and Eric Ogle of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is available at www.arc.gov/research/researchreportdetails.asp?REPORT_ID=98
This word cloud represents the most frequent answers to questions posed by project re-searchers about pressing problems in Appala-chian counties.
ecoNoMic deveLoPMeNt pointed out, quoting an International Monetary Fund study, that “initial con-ditions, including both geography and institutions, are very important for eco-nomic development, having significant effects lasting hundreds of years.”
lack oF broaDbaND IN appalacHIaBroadband is one of many subjects the report covers. No one will be surprised that more than 70 percent of survey par-ticipants cited poor telecommunications and Internet access as likely obstacles to economic growth, or that this lack of connectivity deters growth in a number of ways: “Large employers, for example, require dedicated high-speed data con-nections to conduct business in today’s global economic environment. Small businesses, however, are also affected. Lack of Internet access, for example, prevents Avery County, N.C., Christ-mas tree growers from marketing di-rectly to consumers and makes hotels in Pendleton County, W.V., and Johnson County, Tenn., less attractive and less accessible to visitors.”
More surprising is the researchers’ conclusion that “the impacts of poor ac-cess … go far beyond commerce.” Lack of broadband, they point out, can keep officials from learning about or partici-pating in funding opportunities. It can keep people in isolated areas from hav-ing their voices heard in decisions that
require videoconferencing or webinars. “The negative effects on workforce pre-paredness, digital literacy and govern-ment and civic efficiency run deep,” the authors say.
In addition, their research found that the social and cultural effects of lack of
broadband connectivity are profound. Lack of broadband increases residents’ isolation and adds to their sense of alien-ation. Being unable to participate in an increasingly connected society “may contribute to the exodus from rural ar-eas, especially among young adults and families,” according to the authors.
pressING coNcerNsAs damaging as the lack of broad-band is, residents of these counties had many more-pressing concerns. In non-distressed counties, residents cited five obstacles to economic progress more important than lack of broadband. Resi-dents of distressed counties cited eight. I found it surprising that a higher per-centage of respondents in nondistressed counties considered poor broadband a potential obstacle for economic develop-ment than in distressed counties.
Possibly this is because more ba-sic problems must be addressed before broadband can begin to make a differ-ence. When asked which programs need the most improvement – in general, not
Broadband was more often viewed as an obstacle to economic development in the less-distressed counties.
Residents of Appalachia felt that most of their services need improvement, not only Internet services.
just for economic development – respon-dents named many important programs that they felt need to be addressed.
In the only two counties with good broadband service – Pike County, Ky., and Bell County, Ky. – residents were almost as likely as the average survey respondent to consider broadband an important factor in economic develop-ment though they did not believe lack of broadband access held back develop-ment in their counties.
However, even though both Pike and Bell County residents agreed that broadband was important for economic development and that poor broadband was not an obstacle to economic growth in their counties, they still viewed
broadband-enabled economic opportu-nities in their counties as slightly un-likely. During the researchers’ discus-sions with these residents, no new jobs or businesses were credited to broadband utilization. The researchers commented, “Remarkably, the two counties in this study best positioned to benefit from broadband in fact do not recognize the opportunity that broadband presents
for economic development.” This find-ing illustrates the importance of having a clear vision for leveraging broadband assets for economic development.
HoW beTTer broaDbaND coUlD HelpBroadband could be used to address many of the problems residents said they faced. Applications of high-speed broad-band for job training, health care and mental health, community development, counseling, government, education and literacy, youth programs, entrepreneur-ship and other social needs are rapidly developing and maturing. If the broad-band were there, these applications could be implemented – and could also greatly affect job creation and retention.
As the authors wrote, “Several of the obstacles to economic development that rated highly ... can be diminished with the adoption and utilization of broad-band. These include lessening the im-pacts from the lack of developable land and improving the lack of entrepreneur-ship. Most important, broadband adop-tion would help bridge the distance with more populated areas and would remove the feeling of isolation that was reported from residents and business leaders in those two counties.”
The authors offered 12 recommen-dations to improve economic develop-ment within Appalachia. These cover most aspects of life and business. One of them states, “Community organizations and agencies at all levels of government throughout Appalachia should make broadband access and adoption a prior-ity.” That is a challenge for Appalachia and all of the rural United States.
This is a study that our industry should pay attention to and learn from. We need to help broadband access and adoption become realities for the rural areas of the United States. v
Broadband is not being used as a lever for development even where sufficient broadband is
available to support economic growth.
Residents of the two counties with adequate broadband service considered telecommunications to be important to economic development.
Residents of the two counties with adequate broadband service did not believe broadband was an obstacle to their counties’ economic development.
the Fiber-enabled Future: always-on teleconferencing
Noblis Center for Applied High Performance ComputingDanville, Va.
2 | What Fiber Broadband Can Do For Your Community | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | www.bbcmag.com | FALL 2012
About the coverIn Danville’s fiber-connected Noblis Center, a software development team meets via an always-on videoconferencing facility. Pictured are the Center’s Phillip Hayes, Jr. (left) and William F. Mitchell. See article on page 20.
Source: RVA LLC
Fiber-to-the-Home Subscribers Are Satis ed With Their Broadband Service
Percent of subscribers satis�ed with service
Reliability...
Bandwidth...
Affordability...
Future-Proofing...
Standards...
Security...
Economic Development...
Sustainability...
New Broadband Content & Services...
Higher Revenue... Ph
oto
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contentsFiber to the Home: Pathway to New Broadband Services . . . | 3
Questions Real Estate Developers Ask About FTTH . . . . . . . . | 26
Property Developers Beat The Recession With Fiber . . . . . . . | 28
Is It Really Fiber To the Home? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | 29
This primer was originally written by Steven S. Ross and updated by him and by Masha Zager, both of the Broadband Communities staff. It summarizes research commissioned by the FTTH Council as well as independent reporting by the authors and by BBC contributing editor Joe Bousquin.
FALL 2012 | www.bbcmag.com | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | What Fiber Broadband Can Do For Your Community | 3
Fiber to the home (FTTH) has become the leading technology for next-generation communications networks worldwide. On
every continent, telecom providers are building fiber optic networks to replace legacy copper networks. They know that only FTTH can meet the growing demand for broadband services that require delivering video to (and from) multiple tablets, computers and television sets in a home, all at the same time.
Because governments often view FTTH as critical national infrastructure, many have developed national broadband plans to encourage it and thus encourage economic growth. The United
Fiber to the Home: Pathway to New Broadband Services
Only fiber to the home can meet the growing demand for broadband services.
States is no exception. The National Broadband Plan calls for 100 Mbps connections to 100 million households.
Consumers who subscribe to FTTH consistently rate it as the fastest and most reliable broadband technology. They also appreciate that fiber networks can deliver many unique broadband services for medicine, education, home-based businesses and entertainment.
Already, fiber connections are available to more than 200 million homes globally – a tenth of all the households in the world – and worldwide, an estimated 80 million households subscribe to fiber-based services, including voice, video, data and more. In the United States, one of every five households is within reach of fiber, and more than 8 million households are using FTTH services now.
These numbers continue to grow rapidly. China alone expects to have
100 million fiber subscribers by 2015. By then, 90 percent of all Australians will be connected.
WHo CaN Build FTTH NeTWorkS?Most of the FTTH connections in the United States come from large telephone companies. Verizon’s FiOS network has captured most of the media attention, and some of AT&T’s U-verse service is also based on FTTH. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Today, more than 800 companies supply fiber-to-the-home broadband in the United States. Who are they?
Most of these companies were in the telecommunications business to begin with – more than 600 are local telephone companies, and others include cable companies, local Internet service providers and wireless ISPs. Larger telcos are deploying fiber in cities and suburbs, and smaller telcos and ISPs in rural areas. Cable providers use fiber to compete for lucrative commercial-services business and in new housing developments.
Advertisements to residents promote the many benefits of FTTH.
4 | What Fiber Broadband Can Do For Your Community | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | www.bbcmag.com | FALL 2012
In areas where established telecom providers are not building FTTH, communities are reaching out to nontraditional providers. Local governments are attracted to FTTH because it positions their communities for tomorrow’s jobs and economic growth. In 2010, when Google announced that it planned to build one or more community fiber networks, more than 1,100 local governments proposed their communities as suitable locations.
In some cases, communities build their own networks or collaborate with neighboring communities to do so – there are now about 120 FTTH projects of this kind. (Some of them serve only businesses, not households.) Google, on its way to becoming a new “phone company,” is building a super-fast FTTH network in Kansas City, and other nontraditional providers include cooperative electric utilities, property
developers and even universities.It makes sense for these forward-
looking organizations to build FTTH networks. For example, even in a down economy, most developers can enhance the value of their properties by putting fiber into new properties or upgrading existing properties. Some small electric companies built fiber
When Google announced that it planned to build one or more community fiber networks, more than 1,100 local governments proposed
their communities as suitable locations.
By 2016, there will be nearly three IP-connected devices per person, according to research by Cisco. Only FTTH can meet this demand for in-home bandwidth.
optic networks to manage their own
facilities, and they can easily extend these
to serve their customers as well.
Ftth iS the oNly uNlimited broAdbANd techNology Other types of broadband have
improved a great deal over the last few
years – mostly because providers have
brought optical fiber much closer to
their customers. Some cable providers
use fiber to get close to homes and
then employ copper coaxial cable for
the last hundred to 1,000 feet. Some
phone companies bring fiber to within a
few thousand feet of the home and use
plain copper wire for the rest of the trip. Fourth-generation wireless broadband, which is being deployed today, usually requires fiber connections at cell sites. These new hybrid networks are much more powerful than older copper and wireless access networks.
But copper and wireless “last miles” still have inherently limited capacity. Tweaking more bandwidth from them
FALL 2012 | www.bbcmag.com | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | What Fiber Broadband Can Do For Your Community | 5
becomes increasingly difficult and expensive as time goes on. This isn’t true of optical fiber, whose capacity is effectively unlimited.
Providers and governments around the world all agree that unlocking the potential of broadband requires taking optical fiber all the way to subscribers’ doors. Everyone also agrees that fiber will meet the world’s needs for the foreseeable future. The only debates involve the speed of the transition.
The reason for this striking degree of unanimity is simple: FTTH offers far more bandwidth, reliability, flexibility, security and longer economic life than alternative technologies, even though its price is comparable. It is slightly more expensive to build, but it is far less expensive to operate and maintain than copper.
Fiber can handle any bandwidth demand with ease. In fact, one bundle of fiber cable not much thicker than a pencil can carry all of the world’s current communications traffic. The technologies for transmitting data over fiber are well understood, and the upgrade path for the electronic components that send and receive signals has been defined for years into the future. If anything, increasing fiber bandwidth will become less expensive rather than more expensive.
the PAyoFF For ProviderSFTTH providers can enjoy much greater revenue than traditional broadband providers. FTTH subscribers today often spend 30 to 40 percent more per month than DSL subscribers – not because basic services are more expensive (they aren’t) but because more and better premium services are available.
For example, multiple simultaneous HD channels are difficult to implement well over any medium but fiber; 3D TV and high-definition video communications are even more challenging. Taking pay-TV services on the road (true TV Everywhere) requires high upstream bandwidth at home. Home energy management services benefit from fiber’s high reliability.
Businesses are also willing to pay for new services, including emerging services such as cloud computing and Internet-based backup, storage and business continuity solutions.
Added vAlue For ProPertieS ANd commuNitieSAccess to utilities makes private property more valuable. A house is worth much more if it has access to a public street, water and sewer services, public schools and other utilities. In the same way, FTTH adds value to properties. Fiber connections make single-family homes easier to sell and multiple dwelling units easier to rent. Renters and buyers know they can get the most attractive services available on the market today – and that if an exciting new service is introduced in a few years, they’ll be prepared for that as well.
Communities also benefit from FTTH in ways that don’t always accrue to telecom providers. They become more attractive as locations for people to live and do business. They have an advantage in attracting everything from advanced manufacturing to contact centers to data centers. They can nurture the tech start-ups and home-based businesses that will provide tomorrow’s jobs. They can provide better education and health care for residents, deliver government services more efficiently and engage citizens in government.
This publication explores these issues, and more, in detail. It’s written in nontechnical language so you can understand the value of next-generation infrastructure – and what it means to you – without a degree in optical engineering.
We want to communicate ... the Advantages of Fiber to the home. v
Because copper and wireless have inherently limited capacity, tweaking more bandwidth from
them becomes increasingly difficult and expensive as time goes on. This isn’t true of optical fiber,
whose capacity is effectively unlimited.
Telepresence is one of the advanced applications that depends on a high-bandwidth, high-reliability network. In this photo, the people on the far side of the table are actually sitting in a remote office but can interact with the local group as if they were physically present.
6 | What Fiber Broadband Can Do For Your Community | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | www.bbcmag.com | FALL 2012
More than one of every five homes in North America is now passed by fiber. That means fiber comes close enough for the home to be connected to an FTTH network.
More than 8 million households subscribe to fiber-to-the-home services and can receive the best bandwidth and reliability available.
FTTH Homes Connected, March 2012(Cumulative, North America)
FALL 2012 | www.bbcmag.com | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | What Fiber Broadband Can Do For Your Community | 7
FTTH take rate – the ratio of subscribers to households that have the option of purchasing services – continues to rise. Verizon’s FiOS network, which marketed services faster than it could connect customers, has dragged down the average. Rural network
builders and those that serve large apartment complexes and planned-unit developments typically get take rates above 50 percent. In the six months ending March 2012, net customer additions exceeded 55 percent of net new homes marketed.
The pace of FTTH deployment peaked in 2008 – the first year of the recession – but remains strong and even rose in the latest 6-month period. (No FTTH video data is available for the most recent 6-month period.)
Homes Passed, Marketed, and Connected in Each Six-Month Period Since March 2007(Calculated by BBC from RVA Data)
8 | What Fiber Broadband Can Do For Your Community | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | www.bbcmag.com | FALL 2012
Q: What is bandwidth?A: In a network, bandwidth (what engineers call bitrate) is the ability to carry information. The more bandwidth a network has, the more information it can carry in a given amount of time. Networks with high bandwidth also tend to be more reliable because fewer bottlenecks disturb the flow of information.
Q: How much bandwidth – or information delivered by bandwidth – do we need?A: The amount of bandwidth we need grows every year. The biggest growth has been for video – traditional pay TV, “over the top” or Internet-based video, and video communications. This trend is expected to continue at least for the rest of this decade. Video requires not only extra bandwidth but also extra reliability. The smallest delay in data transmission can result in distorted views.
More video is available than ever before, and people are watching video on more screens at once. In addition, video formats are becoming more bandwidth-intensive. HDTV can require as much as 8 megabits per second (Mbps) for fast
action, such as in sporting events, even with new compression technology. A high-quality 3D experience requires about 5 Mbps minimum. 3D immersive HDTV – already used in some academic and industrial settings for telepresence – requires between 50 and 300 Mbps, and the Super Hi-Vision, or 8K video, recently demonstrated by Comcast requires 360 Mbps.
Q: What about other kinds of data?A: Bandwidth requirements for many kinds of data are exploding. For example, new digital cameras can create larger and larger images; 30 megabytes is not uncommon. In health care, the medical images produced by equipment such as CT scanners are a hundred times larger than camera images, and more.
In the last few years, business and science both entered the era of “Big Data” applications that collect and analyze data on massive scales. Today’s Big Data applications range from consumer pricing models to DNA sequencing to particle physics to control of electrical grids. Big Data doesn’t work without Big Bandwidth.
Q: Can’t copper carry high bandwidth?A: Copper’s capacity is far less than fiber’s. It can support high bandwidth for only a few hundred yards. The longer a signal travels on copper, the lower the bandwidth falls. Optical fiber is unique in that it can carry high-bandwidth signals over enormous distances. Fiber uses laser light to carry signals. Under some circumstances, a signal can travel 40 miles (60 kilometers) without degrading enough to keep it from being received.
Fiber is also far better able to support upstream bandwidth – that is, from a user out to the network. High upstream bandwidth is important for video communication and for many business applications.
Q: What about wireless? I hear 4G wireless can provide 54 Mbps.A: That’s the potential bandwidth shared by all users connected to a cellular antenna site. Wireless broadband depends on fiber to move information to and from cell towers. And even so, each antenna can support only a finite number of cellular signals. Cellular data traffic grew 200-fold from 2006 to 2012 and will grow another eightfold by 2015. Providers are now severely limiting
DSL Bandwidth Declines with Distance from Fiber Node
0
50
100
150
200
0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000
Feet from Fiber Node
Mbp
s
VDSL2With Vectoring
Source: Huawei
Copper can support high bandwidth for only a few hundred yards. The longer a signal travels
on copper, the lower the bandwidth falls.
The bandwidth of a DSL signal declines with distance from the fiber node. VDSL2, the most advanced form of DSL, can deliver about 30 Mbps at 3,000 feet, depending on the quality of the copper. A new technology called node-scale vectoring promises to increase DSL bandwidth – again, only if the copper is in good condition.
Fiber and Bandwidth
FALL 2012 | www.bbcmag.com | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | What Fiber Broadband Can Do For Your Community | 9
wireless data and are encouraging or forcing customers to use Wi-Fi connections instead of cellular networks for data. Those Wi-Fi connections, in turn, work best when they can quickly offload data to a fiber network.
Q: What exactly makes fiber “future proof”?A: The equipment used to send light signals over glass fiber keeps getting better. So equipping an existing fiber network with new electronics and with lasers that pulse light faster, or lasers that use different wavelengths of light, can vastly increase available bandwidth without changing the fiber itself. New electronics are very cheap compared with the original cost of laying the fiber. Therefore, once fiber has been deployed, network operators can keep increasing bandwidth at very little cost.
Q: How long has fiber optic technology been in use?A: Fiber optic cable is the foundation of the world’s telecommunications system. It has been used for more than 30 years to carry communications traffic from city to city and from country to country.
Almost every country has some fiber optic cable, delivering services reliably and inexpensively. The first time fiber delivered a signal directly to an American home (in Hunter’s Creek, Fla.) was more than 20 years ago.
Q: All providers seem to claim they have fiber networks. What’s different about fiber to the home?A: Don’t be fooled! It is true that most cable and DSL networks use some fiber. In these networks, the fiber carries the signal close enough to homes so that copper can carry it the rest of the way. However, this approach requires expensive, difficult-to-maintain electronics at the point where fiber meets copper. The available bandwidth is far less than an all-fiber network. And these halfway approaches do not allow symmetrical bandwidth – cable and DSL systems can’t upload information as fast as they can download it.
Q: Isn’t that good enough?A: It’s not good enough to make your community competitive or support a tech-savvy home-based business. Today’s cable modems and DSL lines may suffice
for consumers to send emails, download songs or share family photos. If you want to log on to the corporate LAN from home and work effectively, you’ll need more. And what about uploading a high-def video of the school play, or sitting down to dinner with family members a thousand miles away?
Q: Why does it matter how close to the home fiber comes in DSL and cable systems?A: With copper cable, bandwidth drops precipitously with distance. For example, the latest commercial versions of DSL can carry a signal of more than 150 Mbps for about 750 feet. Over a half-mile, today’s DSL can deliver only about 30 Mbps. In practice, the real bandwidth is less.
As often happens with fading technologies, a huge effort is being made to squeeze as much as possible out of past investments in copper. The most recent expedient, vectored DSL, is just beginning to appear. It allows 50 Mbps downstream signals for as far as 2,000 feet under ideal conditions. It won’t work on very old copper wiring, its upstream bandwidth is limited and it requires
Fiber optic cable is made up of thin strands of glass that carry information by transmitting pulses of light, usually created by lasers. (Copper cable, by contrast, carries low-voltage electrical signals.) The pulses are turned on and off very, very quickly. A single fiber
can carry multiple streams of information at the same time over different wavelengths, or colors, of light.
Fiber has many advantages over copper wire or coaxial cable:
1 Signals travel long distances inside fiber cable without degradation – 40 miles or more in some real-world networks
and 65 miles or more in the laboratory.
2 Fiber cable is thin and flexible. An individual fiber can be thinner than a human hair. Thin fibers can be packaged in a
narrow ribbon or inside a hollow plastic microduct less than 1/8
inch in diameter. Fiber cable can be hidden easily on the surfaces of walls in old construction.
3 Once installed, fiber is upgraded by changing the electronics that create and receive the light pulses, not by replacing the
cable itself.
4 Fiber cable has a longer life than copper because it does not corrode, is not easily affected by water and generates
no heat. It isn’t damaged by lightning. Nothing hurts it except a physical cut or the destruction of the building it is in.
5 Fiber networks cost less to operate than copper. The most common type of FTTH network uses no electronics – and
therefore no power – between the provider’s central office and the customer premises, which minimizes operating costs. Even optical networks that do require electronics in the field use far less power than coax or other copper networks.
Fiber: the light FantasticFiber and bandwidth
10 | What Fiber Broadband Can Do For Your Community | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | www.bbcmag.com | FALL 2012
hoW big iS A gig?
BandwidthComparisons
only the beginningIn a few years, even 1 Gbps will look small. Soon, most content will be 3D and ultra-high-definition.
64 kbps: Phone line
128 kbps: iSdN
1.5 mbps for a t1 line
20 mbps: Wireless maximum per user with latest technology
100 mbps: dSl maximum per user with latest technology
160 mbps: cable maximum per user with latest technology
Today, fiber’s bandwidth is orders of magnitude bigger than other technologies. As the new generation of 10 Gbps equipment is deployed, the fiber circle will move off the page.
1+ g
bPS
Fiber P
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r, A
Nd g
roWiN
g
(201
2)1+ g
bPS Fib
er P
er
uSer, ANd g
roW
iNg
(2012)
1+ gbPS Fiber Per
uSer, ANd groW
iNg
(2012)
1+ gbPS Fiber Per
uSer, ANd groWiNg
(2012)
expensive electronics. However, it is touted as an interim solution for network builders that cannot afford FTTH.
Q: With cable and DSL, there’s often a gap between advertised and actual bandwidth. Is that true for fiber?A: No. Cable, DSL and even wireless networks are usually heavily oversubscribed – that is, providers promise users more than the total amount of available bandwidth because they know all users aren’t going full throttle most of the time. As a result, networks slow down during periods
of heavy use, such as when teenagers come home from school. Fiber has enough bandwidth that providers can guarantee high speeds with little or no oversubscription. If a fiber network is designed properly, users will always get the speeds that are advertised.
The Federal Communications Commission now insists that carriers deliver the bandwidth they advertise.
Q: Is FTTH technology expensive? A: In new construction, fiber costs about the same as copper to build, and it costs much less to operate and maintain.
Building fiber to the home is expensive only when compared with not building a new network – that is, with making minor tweaks to an existing copper network. The problem is that these less-expensive solutions don’t meet users’ needs. In the last few years, the flood of video content has outrun the ability of older copper technologies to handle bandwidth demands. Providers are shutting off or slowing down service or imposing prohibitive fees for customers who exceed monthly bandwidth caps.
Customers don’t like these restrictions, and they don’t appreciate being called “bandwidth hogs” for using services they have paid for. In addition, it’s not clear that providers save money by failing to meet users’ needs, because limiting bandwidth means limiting revenue potential as well. v
Well-designed fiber networks don’t slow down when teenagers come home from school.
Customers should always get advertised speeds.
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in a century of telephone communications, the bandwidth on voice channels changed very little – yet Internet bandwidth needs are growing exponentially.
That’s because, on the Internet, bandwidth drives innovation, and innovation drives bandwidth demand.
The real value of increased bandwidth is not that it lets us send email faster, but that it lets us do entirely new things. In the past few years, we have seen such dazzling innovations as
• Tablet computers for easy access to games, ebooks, TV programs, email, shopping, banking and an ever-expanding suite of new “apps.”
• Smartphones that aren’t just for mobility but are increasingly used for personal media consumption at home.
• Internet-connected televisions, radios, set-top boxes, Blu-ray Disc players, cameras and picture frames that receive or deliver movies, TV and photos via the Web. Users don’t have to “think Internet” to
put Internet video on the TV. They just check out what’s available, using their TV remotes or tablet computers. Internet-capable TV models are today’s standard offering.
• Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephones that direct incoming callers to any line and take messages in text and video as well as voice.
• Social media that keeps people continuously in touch and up to date – who needs phone calls anymore?
• Two-way video communication whose quality is good enough to bring the illusion of “being there” to teleconferencing. It’s called telepresence. High-definition video communication has even reached the home market; telecommuting workers can send telepresence robots in their offices to sit in for them at meetings while they watch from their home TVs.
• Easy distribution of user-created video that lets grandparents see children, musicians develop
audiences and manufacturers demonstrate new products.
• Digital media lockers that let consumers store music, TV, videos and services on a central server and access them from many devices.
Entertainment and social life aren’t all that have changed. People can access health care and take classes from home, and they can take care of their homes while they’re away, using Internet- connected security cameras and remote energy-monitoring devices. As these services become more widely known and available, more people will demand access to them.
Telecommuting and home-based businesses are on the rise, too. In October 2010, market researcher Michael Render reported that new businesses created by fiber-connected residential users had pumped more than $40 billion into the economy in just the previous 12 months, the largest source of new jobs in 2010. Now, home-based businesses continue to add more employment than any other category.
Many owners of home-based businesses say they could not operate without fiber to the home, and telecommuters say their employers would be less likely to let them work from home without fast, reliable fiber broadband. There appears to be a pent-up demand for working from home at least part-time – in a recent survey of federal employees, 93 percent said they valued the option to telecommute.
There is every reason to believe that innovation will continue, that bandwidth needs will keep on growing – and that only fiber to the home, with its superior reliability and plentiful upstream capacity, will be able to keep delivering the necessary bandwidth. v
Why We’ll Always Need more bandwidth
Fiber ambassadors sign up their
neighbors for a new FTTH network.
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12 | What Fiber Broadband Can Do For Your Community | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | www.bbcmag.com | FALL 2012
A decade ago, cable companies introduced the triple play of voice, video and data that is now the standard telecom offering
worldwide. Fiber’s greater bandwidth and reliability allow FTTH providers to think beyond the triple play and offer services tailored to communities’ needs.
Some of these services help differentiate fiber-to-the-home communities; some generate additional revenue streams or help retain customers; still others can be used by providers or property developers to manage their assets more efficiently. Many do all three.
get your commuNity Noticedtelehealth allows instant access to medical specialists via videoconferencing from a home or community center. The videoconferencing may be integrated with Internet-enabled diagnostic devices (blood pressure cuffs, respiration measurement, etc.), electronic medical records systems, online prescription services and online appointment
scheduling. Telehealth helps keep older adults living independently for longer, and it is a boon for members of the “sandwich generation,” who are responsible for caring for both their children and their elders.
Social applications help build a sense of community. They range from community-focused social networking sites to intranet sites that feature local news and events to video channels that broadcast local athletic contests, artistic productions and political discussions. Because these offerings can be interactive, they easily trump conventional cable public-access stations.
home-automation and concierge services make residents’ lives
comfortable and convenient. Cameras that recognize cars when they enter a community can alert parking attendants and security personnel and then turn on lights and heating or air conditioning at home. Residents can connect with one click to community services or schedule a dry-cleaning pickup, pizza delivery or home repair. These applications also help owners control energy use.
mobility is easier to accommodate with a robust fiber-to-the-home network. Using the backhaul afforded by FTTH, providers can offer Wi-Fi connections to residents in indoor and outdoor public spaces without overloading the network. Residents can bring their laptops or tablets to a pool, check email from a laundry room or listen to Internet radio in a gym.
Add NeW reveNue StreAmSBecause fiber-to-the-home networks have virtually unlimited capacity, unparalleled reliability and remote service monitoring, fiber providers have a wide choice of applications for resale.
the smart electric grid is expected to radically improve the business case for fiber to the home. Connecting electric meters to fiber enables automated meter reading. This is usually the first smart-grid application that utilities deploy because it is relatively straightforward to implement and has an immediate payback. Though most FTTH deployers that have installed smart meters are either public or
Services: beyond the triple Play
The services that fiber to the home supports can make your community a more appealing
place to live, enable efficient asset management and generate new revenues.
Electric meter set up to transmit smart-grid information
summer 2012 | www.bbcmag.com | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | What Fiber Broadband Can Do For Your Community | 13
cooperative electric utilities, a few telcos install and read smart meters and charge utilities on a per-reading basis.
Beyond automated meter reading, such smart-grid applications as demand-response programs, SCADA and outage investigation greatly reduce electric utilities’ operating costs. Smart-grid applications are major reasons that electric utilities across the country have long been building fiber infrastructures.
mobile backhaul is another enormous revenue opportunity for fiber deployers. The exploding demands for mobile bandwidth are prompting wireless providers to upgrade the connections from their cell sites to the Internet (traditional connections are usually copper T1 lines with 1.5 Mbps bandwidth).
About one cell site in four is now served by fiber, and more are added every day. In addition, the next generation of wireless architecture will move all baseband processing from cell sites to the cloud; cell sites will have to be connected via fiber to hubs where processing takes place.
Broadband providers offer many other applications through Web portals or set-top boxes, often at lower prices than customers could obtain by purchasing these services directly. In addition to creating new revenue streams, these applications reduce customer churn, and they lower expenses by keeping more traffic in-network.
online storage allows users to store data files on the Internet, access them from anywhere and share them with others. The cloud computing revolution has moved applications and computing capacity from the desktop to the Web. Service providers now supply managed services to business customers, such as business continuity, that until recently
Fiber is the technology of choice for in-hospital networks and for consultations with off-site specialists. Until recently,
however, regulatory requirements limited the opportunities for using broadband to substitute live-at-home options for costly nursing home care.
A recent study in Philadelphia suggests that these savings are too large to ignore.
NewCourtland, a senior services provider in Philadelphia, operates the LIFE program, modeled on the Medicare/ Medicaid Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE) initiative. PACE serves individuals age 55 or older who are certified to need nursing home care, are able to live safely in the community and reside in a PACE service area.
Ninety-five providers in 31 states received Medicare and Medicaid waivers to operate PACE programs. Although all PACE participants are certified to need nursing home care, the program keeps 93 percent of participants living safely in the community. PACE providers deliver all needed medical and supportive services, including adult day care, medical care, drugs, social services, medical specialists, and hospital and nursing home care when they become necessary. By employing remote monitoring technology, NewCourtland enabled 33 residents to move from traditional nursing home care, realizing an annual savings of more than $1.8 million. Essentially, the technology
helped substitute a $125 per month technology cost per person for $225 per day in nursing home costs, starting in 2008.
Seven of the patients were in a group home, and 26 lived separately. Instead of staffing the patients’ homes with live-in help, NewCourtland installed a Healthsense eNeighbor system that included sensors placed around the home, biometric devices, medication dispensing and a check-in button in each home. Any unwarranted change brings a call from the monitoring center and, if necessary, a response from nearby staff. In a group home, there is one caregiver, supplemented with regular extra support mornings and evenings.
“Keeping even one person out of the hospital can pay for all systems for a PACE program for a year,” said Jim Reilly, Director of Courtland Health Technology. “And more important, the individuals we helped were motivated to leave a nursing home and move into the community, making the extra effort to participate in rehab.”
Inside each patient’s living unit, all equipment is connected by Wi-Fi to a network gateway. Fiber providers, whose networks rarely suffer outages that require on-premises gateway resets, have a huge advantage over DSL or cable providers in supporting programs like this one.
The NewCourtland program could be copied by many local network providers under current regulations. Verizon has now adopted this approach and is offering HealthSense to its FiOS MDU customers.
reducing health care costs through telehealth
Services:
14 | What Fiber Broadband Can Do For Your Community | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | www.bbcmag.com | FALL 2012
were provided only by corporate IT departments.
home security, like many other technologies, is migrating from analog to digital. Digitally based home security allows residents to control settings, receive alerts and view their homes via PC or cellphone. Digital security systems also support a wider range of sensors – not only traditional motion detectors but also cameras, water detectors, smoke detectors and many others. Because digital security uses wiring already installed for broadband, it is inexpensive to install and makes economic sense for renters as well as homeowners.
over-the-top video (delivered on the data service, not the video service) may be offered as either an adjunct to or a substitute for traditional pay TV, and it may be delivered through either a Web portal or a set-top box. The business models, technologies and legal status of provider-delivered OTT video are evolving rapidly – a fact that demonstrates the enormous amount of interest in this application. If OTT video eventually displaces traditional pay TV,
fiber-to-the-home providers are well-positioned to benefit because they can guarantee the quality of user experience.
videoconferencing or video chat is universally available through free or low-cost Web-based services, but the quality of low-end services is often poor. Fiber to the home, with its high upstream bandwidth, presents opportunities for providers to make high-quality videoconferencing available through TV screens.
targeted advertising represents an important potential revenue stream. IPTV ads can be sent to households or specific TVs based on demographic criteria or viewing patterns. Another potential source of advertising dollars is T-commerce, in which television viewers click on ads - or even product placements in television shows - to see more information about products or order them.
mANAge ASSetS more eFFicieNtlyBroadband enables property owners to manage their assets efficiently. The addition of broadband – especially
the high-capacity, high-reliability broadband that fiber enables – turns “smart” buildings into “genius” buildings. Internet-enabled sensors and applications automate work that was once done by maintenance crews – and get it done it more quickly and accurately. Broadband applications also help owners communicate with tenants and employees.
Guarding buildings and construction sites can be managed inexpensively and intelligently through IP-based video surveillance. Videoconferencing allows construction managers to make virtual site inspections more frequently than they can make physical inspections. Online work order scheduling helps property managers be more responsive to their residents while reducing operating expenses. Residents can request repairs at any time – not just when the office is open or they can find the superintendent – and management personnel can deal with problems that require personal attention rather than routine requests. Residents can be automatically notified when work is completed.
Proprietary building management networks, such as fire protection systems, can be replaced by standards-based systems that are less expensive.
Energy management and water management can be broadband-enabled.
Motion sensors, intelligent thermostats and automated ventilation equipment can keep public spaces
and unoccupied units at appropriate temperatures; applications that monitor and analyze usage help property managers and residents find opportunities to shift loads to nonpeak times and reduce their overall usage. v
Critical services that must be available all the time – such as medical monitoring and fire
protection – benefit from the extra reliability of fiber broadband.
Rural telco BEK brings local sports events to its video customers; this is the mobile studio.
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most schools now have Internet access, thanks to the federal E-Rate program, but adequate school
broadband is still rare. Fiber-connected schools, however, can enhance students’ educational opportunities.
For example, the Forsyth County school district in Georgia uses a business Ethernet connection from Comcast to support streaming video, interactive whiteboards, mobile devices and digital content. The school system ensures that each of its 38,000 students makes use of the high-speed connectivity.
The district is putting into place a next-generation learning system to provide individualized, technology-based learning plans based on students’ needs, preferences and performance. The system takes into account learning interests and learning style to increase student engagement and boost their academic performance. Students can learn at home on their own or at school, using high-speed Internet connections, and be rewarded by their teachers in collaborative settings.
Initiatives such as Bring Your Own Technology (BYOT) and the NOBLE Virtual World project also help engage Forsyth County students in new ways. With BYOT growing at a rate of 80 percent, students use their individual Internet-capable tablets, laptops, netbooks and cellphones to work in classrooms in the ways that best suit them.
The NOBLE Virtual World project lets students interact with each other in a digitally created world, where anything they imagine can be created. Students develop creativity, data analysis skills and problem solving skills by working in teams and creating plans and solutions for their projects.
Increased educational outcomes aren’t the system’s only benefits. Forsyth
County Schools has been able to reduce its textbook costs by about 85 percent by using interactive online content, including streaming video, simulations and other digital resources. The administrative offices also benefit from fast and efficient data transmission, as well as file sharing and document storage via the district’s central server.
“Bandwidth is the key. The only way to have access to all that digital content is to connect the technology and infrastructure in support of it,” said Bailey Mitchell, chief technology and information officer for Forsyth County Schools. “My view is that every time you increase the speed of the network, you are enabling incredible educational opportunities.”
Another educational innovation taking hold in districts with superior broadband capabilities is the “flipped classroom.” Teachers record lessons as videos on YouTube or similar sites, and sudents study the lessons at home, pausing and replaying parts they find difficult. In school, students solve problems based on the previous night’s lesson and get individual help from teachers. v
the Future of education
“Every time you increase the speed of the network, you are enabling incredible
educational opportunities.”– Bailey Mitchell, CTO and CIO, Forsyth County (Ga.) Schools
Students using computers at a school library in Rocksprings, Texas, on the day they became available. Library director Lisa Scroggins says the boys immediately told all their friends about the computers, and usage jumped quickly. Photo courtesy of Texas State Library and Archives Commission.
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Q: Isn’t Wi-Fi or 4G cellular service a good substitute for fiber? The National Broadband Plan calls for wireless in remote areas.A: Wireless services are important public
amenities, but they are not substitutes
or replacements for FTTH. Rather, they
complement and extend fixed fiber
networks. Many wireless access points
and cell sites are already fiber-connected,
and most of them will be soon. Wireless
service can thus be considered an
application on a fiber network rather
than a separate type of network.
Wireless access alone cannot
attract new businesses to a community
or enable businesses to grow. Wireless
networks that cover wide areas are not
reliable enough to deliver video and
other emerging broadband services
with high quality of service. Wi-Fi is
highly desirable in targeted areas
such as commercial shopping streets
and the common areas of multifamily
communities, but no one has been able
to develop a compelling business case for
a municipalitywide Wi-Fi network.
Q: Don’t cable companies (with DOCSIS 3.0) and telephone companies (with FTTN plus DSL) both use fiber?A: They use fiber, but usually not all the
way to the home. The last 1,000 to 5,000
feet from the fiber’s endpoint to the
home is copper – coaxial cable in the
case of DOCSIS, plain copper wire for
FTTN. That limits bandwidth, reliability
and versatility.
Q: Is my community underserved? Most residents have some broadband access, and the incumbent operators plan to upgrade their networks in a few years.A: Even with upgrades, your non-fiber
network won’t be able to handle the
ever-increasing bandwidth demands
placed on it. Be sure to consider the
needs of the business community in
addition to those of residents – many
economic development officials believe
1 Gbps access is needed to lure new
businesses to a town. Finally, be aware
that significant broadband upgrades are
not feasible in many smaller communities
whose infrastructure has not been kept
up to date.
Q: Can a fiber network help bring new business into my community?A: There’s quite a bit of evidence that
fiber connectivity encourages businesses
to stay, allows businesses to grow and
attracts new businesses, particularly in
high-tech industries. FTTH also facilitates
home-based start-up businesses and
helps workers telecommute. Finally, it
FTTH for Communities
Questions Municipal Officials Ask About FTTH
By spring 2012, the number of public and public-private fiber networks reached about 120, with several new projects enabled by broadband stimulus funding. Many communities are expanding networks they started building in
earlier years, also thanks in part to stimulus funding.In July, Google launched gigabit Internet service in Kansas
City, Kan., and Kansas City, Mo. – locations it chose in large part
because the city governments were willing to collaborate with it.All this activity has made municipal officials keenly
aware of the potential for using ultra-broadband to promote economic development and enhance the quality of life in their communities. They are looking for new ways to encourage private providers to build FTTH networks, new partnership arrangements with telecom providers and ways to leverage such municipal assets as conduit, utility poles and existing fiber.
FTTH is only one part of an economic development program – but it’s a vitally
important part. Evidence shows fiber broadband helps attract, retain and grow businesses.
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makes a community a more attractive place to live – especially for young people – which can stem the population loss that many small communities experience. FTTH is only one component of an overall economic development strategy – but it’s a vitally important one.
Q: My town’s residents are just like others in the region, and maybe have even slightly higher incomes. Why don’t the phone and cable companies consider them attractive customers for FTTH?A: Many cable companies, telephone companies and independent broadband providers are now installing FTTH. But the companies operating in your town may have prioritized other service areas that offer them more geographical or demographic advantages. Or, they may
not have access to the capital needed upfront to expand their services.
Q: The telephone company that operates here is installing FTTH in the new development just 10 miles up the road. Why not here?A: Installing fiber in new developments is usually easier than installing it in existing neighborhoods. The fiber goes into the same trenches that have to be dug anyway for water, electricity and sewer service. In fact, copper wiring usually can’t be run that way, so fiber is usually cheaper. Also, the new residents have not yet subscribed to cable or phone service, so whoever installs an FTTH network in a new community has an easier time signing up customers. That’s why most new, large housing developments are
being equipped with fiber.
Q: Would installing fiber require that my streets be dug up?A: It depends. Many network builders in North America use aerial fiber installed on poles along with existing telephone, electric and cable wiring. Where trenching is impractical, contractors can often use horizontal drilling or pull fiber through existing ducts, water pipes, sewers and gas lines rather than digging up streets and sidewalks.
When there is no good alternative to trenching, new microtrenching techniques may allow it to be done with less disruption to traffic. A deep groove is cut quickly into the pavement with a large circular saw on wheels, and fiber is laid into the groove.
Finally, many cities already have usable fiber under their streets – fiber that is not being used to its limit.
One key move: Start preparing for fiber now by adding underground ducts whenever you or a utility repair a street or open it to excavation. You can also adopt an “open trench” policy that gives telecom providers the opportunity to install ducts any time a street is opened.
Pulaski Electric System, a municipal electric utility in Pulaski, Tenn., uses its FTTH network to operate a smart electric grid and deliver triple-play services to residents.
Start preparing for fiber now by adding underground ducts whenever you or a utility
repair a street or open it for excavation. You can also give others the opportunity to install ducts.
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Q: How can I get fiber to my residents without building my own network? My town has too much debt now to borrow more, and we have no experience operating a municipal utility.A: You might try lobbying the incumbents – the cable and telephone companies serving your town now. You could offer such incentives as a reduced franchise fee, access to public property or an accelerated permitting process. If you own an institutional fiber ring that connects municipal buildings, schools and libraries, you might be able to propose fiber swaps. In addition, some communities launch educational campaigns about the value of FTTH and encourage residents to commit to taking fiber services if and when a provider offers them.
Another tactic is to invite outside companies to bring FTTH to your residents and offer the same kinds of incentives described above. Or you could enter into a public-private partnership to build a fiber network jointly with a private partner. In Europe, such partnerships are common, and the approach has begun to gain traction in the United States. A variety of different arrangements between the public and private parties are being used.
When Google proposed in 2010 to build an FTTH network in one or more American communities, more than 1,100 communities responded with proposals for how they could work together with the company. Last year, a group of university communities banded together to invite both incumbent and competitive providers (as well as nontraditional providers) to build advanced networks. This project, called Gig.U, is already showing results.
Q: Is it better for the same company to run the network and provide services, or should we consider an open-access network with multiple providers?A: Both methods have been successful. Open-access networks, in which the public or private network builder “rents”
bandwidth to a potentially unlimited number of service and content providers, are more common in Europe and Asia than in the United States. However, they have succeeded here as well. At present, open-access networks in the United States tend to be either municipal networks or networks built by companies that specialize in bringing fiber to new buildings and subdivisions.
Municipal utilities sometimes prefer to provide services directly, at least at the outset, for two reasons: First, it gives them more control over the quality of user experience on their networks, and second, they may have difficulty attracting third-party service providers to start-up networks. The downside of a closed network, however, is that there is less variety in content and services. Many public broadband advocates believe that
opening networks to innovative service providers is the best way to maximize the networks’ value for their communities. Networks built with broadband stimulus funds must allow open access.
Q: Where can I go to find out more?A: The FTTH Council (www.ftthcouncil.org) holds quarterly meetings and monthly webinars and offers other information for fiber deployers. Broadband Communities’ municipal portal, www.munibroadband.com, can direct you to additional resources, and its FTTH deployment database at www.fiberville.com shows all FTTH deployments by municipalities and others, including small telephone companies.
The National Broadband Map (www.broadbandmap.gov) can provide data about the speed and availability of broadband in your area. v
A municipality can offer many incentives to a private telecom provider – either an incumbent or a competitive overbuilder – to help make building
an FTTH network viable for the provider.
Danville, Va .’s use of its own utility poles for the nDanville network saved the city time and money.
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the new National Broadband Map – a continuing, nationwide collection of broadband availability and usage (www.broadbandmap.
gov) – can help communities deploy FTTH networks where they are most needed and use them to best advantage.
Though the data are still being refined, the map has already been used by:
• industry to site new facilities.• Service providers to target new
opportunities.• municipalities to monitor
broadband adoption.• Native American tribal authorities
to reveal broadband training needs.• Policymakers to target broadband
grants.
As these maps show, denser populations are better served with
broadband. Other variables are significant, too – for example, national data suggests that education is key in acceptance of broadband services. One of the maps shows educational levels in the Kansas City area. It would be easy for a private cable operator to target buildings in areas with high educational levels … except that Google is building a 1 Gbps network throughout the whole community! v
Planning a Fiber Network? use the National broadband map.
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The reliability, bandwidth and future-proofing of fiber to the premises creates new jobs and preserves old ones. A few examples:
danville makes a comebackDanville was an economic powerhouse in south central Virginia until the decline of tobacco and textiles. Facing the state’s highest unemployment rates, and unable to attract businesses without affordable fiber services, local leaders began a development program centered on advanced telecommunications infrastructure, technology education and workforce training, and targeted downtown revitalization projects.
Today, companies using sophisticated new technology are moving to Danville. The city became the second site globally for a next-generation Cray XMT supercomputer. The supercomputer, part of the new Noblis Center for Applied High
Performance Computing, will reduce the cost of access to supercomputing facilities for businesses regardless of location. IKEA chose Danville as the location for its first U.S. manufacturing facility, in large part for its access to fiber, and CBN, which produces all the driver’s licenses for Virginia, located in Danville in part because of the security of its fiber connections. Employment is higher today than it has been since 2004.
“We came to Danville because they get it,” H. Gilbert Miller, Noblis corporate VP and chief technology officer, said in regard to the city’s fiber infrastructure. The center, located in a former tobacco warehouse, provides a glimpse of the future of teleconferencing, with its always-on video screens that in effect extend the Noblis Danville offices into other locations and vice versa.
Corrie Teague of Danville’s Office of Economic Development notes the network’s success in inducing technology
companies to start up or move to the area, creating a positive spiral effect. “High-tech companies attract other technology companies,” says Teague. “Some of these, particularly data centers, represent a high capital investment into our community. Each one can bring hundreds of millions of dollars in innovations and construction as well as increase local tax revenue,” she adds.
esl business in Wyoming ToWnsEleutian Technology partners with CDI Holdings of South Korea, a market leader in English education, to teach conversational English to South Korean students via high-speed videoconferencing. Headquartered in rural Ten Sleep, Wyo., Eleutian has gone on to partner with Chinese ministries and operates nine teaching centers throughout the western United States, including in FTTH communities Cody and Powell, Wyo.
seven hundred thousand FTTH subscribers operated home-based businesses in 2010, adding $41.6 billion to the U.S. economy in the
12 months ending August 2010 – about $10 billion of which would have been lost if fiber connections had not been available.
To place these figures (conservative estimates by market research firm RVA) in context, 700,000 jobs are more than the entire U.S. economy created in 2010! FTTH access is strongly associated with home businesses, according to RVA data. Doubling the download bitrate of
broadband services adds 0.5 percent to the number of broadband customers with a home business. Small businesses also depend on broadband reliability and on upstream speed – both metrics where fiber vastly outpaces other broadband technologies.
Larger businesses, too, benefit from fiber connections. In a 2011 Comcast survey, more than three-quarters of commercial building owners and managers said access to advanced telecommunications services was an important selling tool for them. In high-rise office buildings, access to advanced communications was the third most
important selling point; for the largest property owners, it was tied with location for the most important selling point.
Surveys of economic development professionals suggest that businesses often stay where they are even if broadband service is less than optimal – though, of course, they may miss opportunities to grow and thrive. But a business that has to move looks for a location with fast, reliable, affordable broadband – preferably at least 1 Gbps. Thus, communities and commercial buildings without excellent broadband service have difficulty competing for new business.
FTTH generates Jobs
FTTH success stories
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The company is open for business 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s the largest new job creator in the region. Said President Barack Obama in January 2011, “In Ten Sleep, Wyo., a town of about 300 people, a fiber optic network allowed a company to employ several hundred teachers who teach English to students in Asia over the Internet, 24 hours a day. You’ve all heard about outsourcing. Well, this is what we call ‘insourcing,’ where overseas work is done right here in America.”
Rob Duncan, COO of Alpine Access, a provider of contact center services that uses home-based agents, also opened a virtual call center in Powell. He said, “Consider the 5,500 residents of Powell, Wyo. With 20 percent of the population below the poverty line and the town located 500 miles from the largest metropolitan area, the citizens knew something drastic needed to be done to save the idyllic quality of life they cherished in a small town. Together they decided to spend $4.9 million on connecting each home to a private-public fiber optic network. This high-speed access helped connect them with distant relatives, provided online shopping and opened up new markets for local businesses. It also made the entire population attractive to virtual call center recruiters.”
cHaTTanooga gains 2,400 JobsAs many as 2,400 jobs – at a new Volkswagen Passat factory and an Amazon distribution center, among others – have come to Chattanooga, Tenn., because of its fiber-based broadband and the reliable power that its fiber-enabled smart electric grid guarantees. In addition, the city is attracting a new generation of entrepreneurs and gaining a reputation as a place to start and grow businesses. Even companies based in Knoxville, 100 miles away, are looking to Chattanooga when they want to expand.
auburn reTains a key employerIn 2005, Cooper Industries, a Fortune 200 company whose global data operations were located in Auburn, Ind., was at a crossroads – it had to either expand its Auburn facility or relocate. The company’s most critical requirement was for fast, resilient and reliable broadband.
Auburn Essential Services, a municipal broadband provider, worked with Cooper to craft a business-class broadband service and thereby preserve $7 million in annual payroll for the community. In addition, the city has retained a number of Internet-dependent, small but growing businesses.
brisTol, va., TransForms iTs economyThe fiber network in Bristol, Va., has fundamentally changed the economic face of Southwest Virginia. Thanks to grants from the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Virginia Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission, businesses in seven rural counties in southwestern Virginia now have access to broadband speeds of up to 1 Gbps and to transparent LAN service, which vastly improves their communications and networking capabilities.
Auburn, Ind., retained key employers by providing fiber connectivity.
22 | What Fiber Broadband Can Do For Your Community | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | www.bbcmag.com | FALL 2012
High-tech companies Northrop Grumman and CGI both built major facilities in Russell County, and two new industrial parks were built. By 2008, the high-tech infrastructure had brought 1,220 new jobs to the region, with more than $50 million in new private investment and $37 million in annual payrolls. Growth has continued through the recession.
Small health clinics in isolated locations of Southwest Virginia can be digitally linked to larger comprehensive hospitals. The University of Virginia at Wise launched the state’s first undergraduate software engineering program in partnership with Northrop Grumman and CGI. The town of Lebanon turned a former shopping center into the Virginia Technology Development Center, a new high-tech training facility managed by the University of Virginia at Wise.
lenoWisco Fiber nurTures businessesMore from Southwest Virginia: Many businesses were able to stay or expand in the region because of broadband, including home-based businesses and larger ones such as Crutchfield Electronics. New businesses that located in the area because of LENOWISCO’s broadband network include OnePartner, an advanced technology and application center and the only commercial Tier 3 data center in the United States. Holston Medical Group stores its electronic medical records at OnePartner’s data center, taking advantage of the data center’s capacity and connectivity to run virtual clinical trials.
In this depressed area, residential customers use broadband to better their lives. Close to one-third use their broadband service to earn degrees that
would make them eligible for better-paying jobs or in home-based businesses.
These work-from-home employees and owners of cottage industries include an interior designer who uses broadband to search for design inspirations, agents who manage health insurance programs for a national health insurance company, a person who manages orders for a national floral service over the Internet and a toolmaker who sells wedges for leveling mobile homes.
rural ouTsourcing in missouriShane Mayes, CEO, describes Onshore Technology Services as a rural outsourcing company. It provides software development and integration and other technology services in competition with vendors in India, China, Mexico, Russia and Brazil. His company opened in 2005 and has employees around the state. Mayes said he chose Macon and Lebanon, Mo., for his offices because those cities had already run fiber to every business and household in their area. His company would open offices
only in communities with access to high-speed Internet, Mayes said.
gainesville aTTracTs bioTecH Gainesville, Fla.’s municipal fiber network has attracted businesses and helped them expand. The Progress Corporate Park, located outside Alachua, hosts many biotech organizations as well as the University of Florida’s Sid Martin Biotechnology Incubator. GRUCom provides fiber services to Santa Fe College’s Alachua Corporate Training Center, located next to the research park. The center provides workforce training for the biotech industry.
Gainesville partnered with the Council on Economic Development to provide high-speed connectivity to the Gainesville Technology Enterprise Center, which also fosters early-stage technology start-up companies. Several businesses that received connectivity at the center have matured and moved to locations where GRUCom’s services are available and continue to use them today.
laFayeTTe becomes a media HubLafayette, La.’s fiber network has attracted call centers and video production operations – firms that depend on reliable broadband to move huge files back and forth among video editing and special-effects firms worldwide. The result: thousands of new jobs. v
The FTTH network in Gainesville, Fla., helps incubate biotech businesses.
Instead of outsourcing support to offshore call centers, companies are “insourcing” to FTTH communities.
FALL 2012 | www.bbcmag.com | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | What Fiber Broadband Can Do For Your Community | 23
though the average broadband download speed in the U.S. today is about 6 Mbps, many people are betting that a gigabit (1 Gbps,
or 1000 Mbps) will be the standard soon enough for both downstream and upstream links. Only fiber to the home can support this standard.
Google’s FTTH deployment in Kansas City, Kan., and Kansas City, Mo., made “gigabit” a household word, but Google is hardly the first to offer these speeds. Many providers now offer gigabit – or even 10 gig – speeds to businesses. Among residential providers, EPB Fiber Optics (the municipally owned network in Chattanooga, Tenn.) offers 1 Gbps access throughout its service area, as does LUS Fiber in Lafayette, La., UTOPIA in Utah and Morristown Utility Systems FiberNET in Morristown, Tenn. In addition, Sonic.net in Sebastopol, Calif., and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, offer 1 Gbps service in limited areas, and other providers plan to offer such services soon.
More than three dozen American research universities are collaborating on Gig.U, a program to bring 1 Gbps fiber access to the communities surrounding their campuses. One of the first projects is centered on the University of Maine in Orono, close to the depressed Bangor area. The service provider will be GWI, an independent ISP in Maine.
WhAt Will you do With A gig?When it announced its program, Google offered several scenarios. “Imagine sitting in a rural health clinic, streaming three-dimensional medical imaging over the Web and discussing a unique condition with a specialist in New York,” its statement said. “Or downloading a high-definition, full-length feature film in less than five
minutes. Or collaborating with classmates around the world while watching live, 3D video of a university lecture.” Since Google began building the network, the two Kansas City governments have been working closely with the private sector and local foundations to make sure the community derives maximum benefit from the new infrastructure.
In Chattanooga, Harold DePriest, CEO of EPB, called his city’s FTTH network “the basis for creating the products and services of the Internet of the future.” In 2012, the city sponsored a summer program in which entrepreneurs and students competed to develop gigabit business ideas, tested them with customers on a live network, and won startup money and mentoring to help commercialize their ideas.
US Ignite Partnership, a new public-private project launched with leadership from the National Science Foundation, chose Chattanooga, Lafayette and other communities as test beds to develop the applications of the future. The project focuses on new applications in health care, education, workforce development,
energy, advanced manufacturing and public safety.
eArly gig AdoPterS A recent survey by Telecom Thinktank and RVA LLC found (not surprisingly) that 1 Gbps subscribers are heavy Internet users – or even households with several heavy Internet users. They are online an average of eight hours per day, compared with the overall average of 2.5 hours, and they have many networked devices. Some of them may be streaming movies and chatting on Facebook while participating in multiple online games through multiple consoles.
In addition, many are content creators. Traffic measurements by Hong Kong Broadband, which provides 1 Gbps service in Hong Kong, show its gigabit subscribers use three times more upload bandwidth than download bandwidth. Upload speed is critical for distributing HD photos and videos, efficient cloud computing and virtual-presence videoconferencing.
Finally, superfast connectivity also appeals to work-at-home professionals who need low latency and rapid file transfers. v
introducing 1 gbps to the home
24 | What Fiber Broadband Can Do For Your Community | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | www.bbcmag.com | FALL 2012
Perceived Bene�ts For MDU Properties With Superior Broadband
Excellent broadband service is a major marketing advantage for MDU properties; two of five respondents said this translates into increased rental prices, according to a 2012 survey of MDU owners and managers commissioned by Broadband Communities and conducted by RVA LLC.
Builders, Real Estate Developers and FTTH
Virtually all large developers of single-family homes and many developers of multiple-dwellling-unit (MDU) communities add FTTH to new properties. Many are retrofitting older properties as well.
Before the housing boom ended, RVA LLC estimated, on the basis of surveying home buyers and developers, that FTTH added about $5,000 to the price of a home. The size of the price differential is less certain today, but FTTH homes clearly sell faster than homes without FTTH.
By mid-2006, FTTH was economically viable in new developments with as few as 80 MDU living units or 100 single-family homes. That number has continued to fall based on improvements in deployment technology.
Though only about 6 percent of MDU residents have fiber connections today, the technology is rapidly becoming mainstream in the multifamily world. In a 2012 survey of MDU property owners and property managers by RVA LLC, most said superior broadband was an important advantage in terms of marketing, occupancy or tenant satisfaction. Those who understood that fiber to the home could deliver superior broadband were interested in installing it – in fact, though
only about 39 percent of survey respondents were aware of FTTH at the outset of the survey, 42 percent said they thought FTTH was important to tenants, and by the end of the survey, 49 percent said they would be interested in installing it in new buildings. (All these percentages were considerably higher for respondents with new properties, higher-end properties and large properties.)
Fiber can be bent tightly around corners and is now as easy to install in buildings as cable, if not easier.
For more information on this survey, see the July 2012 issue of BroadBand Communities.
FALL 2012 | www.bbcmag.com | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | What Fiber Broadband Can Do For Your Community | 25
Reasons For Interest In Providing FTTH For New MDUs
4%5%
7%8%
9%14%14%
18%21%
0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25%
More bandwidth will be needed in futureCost e�ective in new construction
Technical people here Easier to install in new property
Amenity/ Competition w/ other properties
Those who said they were interested in FTTH for new buildings are aware of the ease of installing FTTH in greenfield construction and of the long-term advantages of FTTH for property values.
Interest In Providing FTTH For Existing MDUs
10%
37%
19%
33%
0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40%
Very interested
Somewhat interested
Not very interested
Not at all interested
Interest in installing FTTH in existing MDUs was slightly lower – largely because retrofits are more difficult and expensive – but still exceeded the percentage of respondents who were aware of FTTH at the beginning of the survey.
Interest In Providing FTTH For New MDUs
18%
31%
11%
40%
0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40% 45%
Very interested
Somewhat interested
Not very interested
Not at all interested
Thirty-nine percent of survey respondents were aware of FTTH before the survey was taken, but once the technology was explained to them, 49 percent were interested in installing it in new MDU properties.
26 | What Fiber Broadband Can Do For Your Community | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | www.bbcmag.com | FALL 2012
Q: How can I justify adding to the price of a home in a weak market?A: First, don’t assume that fiber is more expensive to install than copper – that’s not necessarily the case. Second, homes sell for higher prices when they are wired for high bandwidth and provide access to fiber. What’s more, FTTH homes sell faster than non-FTTH homes in the same market. In good times, this may translate into a greater profit, but it’s even more important in bad times. If few homes are sold, you can bet that homes with high-bandwidth amenities sell faster. This is equally true for rental properties. Developers of multiple-dwelling-unit communities say their new buildings lease up faster if they can advertise them as fiber-connected.
Q: Do buyers and renters really care about fiber to the home? How many of them have heard of it?A: They really care about fast, reliable broadband. Survey after survey shows that FTTH customers are more satisfied with their broadband and TV service than cable, DSL and wireless customers.
Q: Do I need to hire an engineering firm to design the installation?A: Fiber does need to be engineered in large apartment complexes – that’s true for coax, too. But smaller installations, as with smaller corporate LANs, do not need that kind of sophistication to work well. Greater standardization, clever new systems from equipment vendors, fiber that can be stapled and bent tightly around corners, distributors’ growing design expertise and an expanding corps of qualified technicians have made less formal design regimes feasible in the last few years.
Q: Will other labor on my construction site damage the fiber cable?
A: Optical fiber is very, very thin – thinner than a human hair. But fiber vendors have developed many techniques to protect fibers from harm. Cable can be armored to ward off cuts. Contractors can route inexpensive microduct – hollow plastic tubes typically 1/8 inch in diameter – through walls before the walls are closed in with drywall or other materials. The microducts are easily repairable. After everything else is completed , thin fiber can be “blown” through the microduct for hundreds of feet.
New fiber can be bent almost like copper. Some vendors offer fiber in thin adhesive tape that can be rolled onto walls.
Q: Do any building codes pertain to fiber? The stuff seems inert.A: Yes, all the usual fire and life-safety issues apply. For instance, just as copper with PVC sheathing would be considered a life-safety hazard because of the combustion products released when it burns, so would various plastics used in fiber that is meant for outside installation. Indoors, look for Low Smoke Zero Halogen (LSZH) cables. If you are using thin plastic microduct, it should be labeled Halogen-Free Flame Retardant. You use a simple junction box to change from “outside” to “inside” wiring, just as you might with electrical cables.
Of course, you should check with your local building code inspector. Aside from fire issues, codes may govern where
fiber optical network terminals (ONTs – the boxes that convert pulses of light from the fiber into electrical signals for the computer or TV) may be placed on the outside walls or in common areas. A few municipalities specify where network connections should be placed in homes.
Q: Where should we put users’ network connections, assuming no specific building code or guidance document covers that subject?A: Expect users to desire broadband connections in virtually any room in the house – bedrooms, office-dens, the kitchen. That’s because Internet connections these days accommodate telephones, televisions, set-top boxes, digital picture frames, security sensors, fire and smoke monitors and, of course, computers. As the “Internet of things” develops, more appliances will be Internet-enabled. To minimize wireless interference inside multifamily buildings, experts often advise using wired Ethernet connections for all stationary IP-connected devices.
Portable consumer electronics devices, such as smartphones and tablets, usually communicate with the Internet via Wi-Fi – as do appliances (manufacturers have adopted a standard for building Wi-Fi into major appliances), so you also need a wireless gateway. Such gateways are offered by all vendors as standard-issue, to be used on the home side of fiber network deployments.
Questions real estate developers Ask About Ftth
Do home buyers and renters really care about fiber? What they care about is fast, reliable
broadband – and surveys show they are satisfied with FTTH service.
FALL 2012 | www.bbcmag.com | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | What Fiber Broadband Can Do For Your Community | 27
Q: In single-family homes, I often see ONT boxes hung on the outside walls. Can they also be placed indoors?A: Yes. In harsh climates, where heat or heavy snow could affect the outside installation, you will probably want to put ONTs indoors. Outdoor ONT models are sometimes placed in garages or utility rooms; you can also buy small, portable indoor models that look more like cable or DSL modems and connect them with tough, flexible fiber that can be laid anywhere. Indoor ONTs, which are popular with apartment dwellers, are sometimes designed to be user-installed.
Q: Why do ONTs require backup batteries?A: Optical fiber cannot conduct electricity. Thus, to keep a network connection running during a power outage, you need a battery at the user premises or a fiber cable that includes a thin copper conductor connected to an off-site battery. This requirement may change as cellular phones replace landlines – a change that has already taken place in most of Europe. In North America, where about two-thirds of households still have landlines, many standard designs are available for in-wall, between-stud boxes that hold the battery, ONT and fiber connections.
Q: Does every dwelling unit or office need its own ONT located at the unit?A: No. Separate ONTs for each unit in a multiple-dwelling-unit building can be located centrally, often in a basement or an equipment cabinet. There are also ONTs designed to serve multiple units, typically four or eight. This flexibility is made possible by new, smaller, low-power circuitry and by the fact that some ONTs can deliver 1 Gbps or more – enough bandwidth to share among multiple customers.
Q: Is lightning a problem with fiber?A: No. Because fiber does not conduct electricity, lightning strikes do not affect fiber at all.
Q: Is FTTH a sustainable technology?A: FTTH generally consumes less power than other broadband technologies. Passive optical networks (GPON and EPON) are especially energy-efficient because they require no active electronics in the field. FTTH enables more sustainable lifestyles, too. A 2008 study by PricewaterhouseCoopers showed that the greenhouse gas emissions associated with deploying
an FTTH network are outweighed within five years by the savings from increased telecommuting. Other fiber-enabled applications, such as telehealth, telepresence, distance learning and cloud computing – and, of course, smart-grid applications and home energy management – reduce travel, minimize heating and cooling loads or help shift energy consumption to renewable sources. v
Pathways for structured wiring can be created before walls are finished.
28 | What Fiber Broadband Can Do For Your Community | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | www.bbcmag.com | FALL 2012
Ftth AmeNity helPS leASe uP Forty57 iN lexiNgtoN
When Ball Homes started building Forty57, a 360-unit luxury apartment community just
southeast of downtown Lexington, Ky., and the University of Kentucky, it needed an extra edge. With the first units coming online in May 2009, the developer was not only leasing a greenfield development in the depths of the Great Recession but also offering a higher-end product for a sophisticated demographic at a time when doubling and tripling up had suddenly come back into vogue.
To add value to its offering and ensure that the community stayed on the cutting edge of technology for the foreseeable future, Ball Homes partnered with Little Rock, Ark.-based Windstream Communications. After negotiating a bulk subscription deal for residents, Windstream deployed a GPON fiber-to-the-unit network at the community to light up a triple-play offering of voice, video and data, including dedicated 911 connectivity. For $89 a month, residents could enjoy a take-if-you-want base programming package that included 12 Mbps data speeds; 60 channels of DISH Network programming, including HBO; and incoming terrestrial phone service plus 911 over traditional phone lines. Forty57 was the first fiber-to-the-unit MDU in the Lexington market.
Although Ball Homes thought an optional amenity would be more palatable during tight times, Windstream saw nearly a 100 percent take rate from residents who moved into the first phase of the project, and occupancy was 75 percent after nine months. Why? Forty57
has amenities that go beyond the pool, gym and community lounge.
“By going with fiber, we’re at the top of the game here locally while future-proofing the property for the foreseeable future,” says Brandon Buffin, Ball Homes’ IT director. “It’s been quite a positive.”
At the AlexAN midtoWN, Ftth oFFerS ‘more For the moNey’For Trammell Crow’s Steve Hester, just getting the Alexan Midtown project up and running was a Herculean task. In 2007, while his team was planning the 275-unit mid-rise on the edge of Sacramento’s hip Midtown area, the wheels started coming off capital market financing. Originally, Trammell Crow envisioned the project as a condominium whose units would be marketed to young professionals working in Sacramento’s health and government sectors, but it had to modify that plan quickly as lenders began to balk.
The company thought the project still made sense as a rental. The site is located in Sacramento’s “medical triangle” within easy biking distance of three major hospitals and just a few minutes from the California State Capitol and myriad state government offices and agencies.
There was only one catch: Given Sacramento’s starring role in the housing debacle, with the area ranking near the top of foreclosure statistics nationally, the rental market was flooded with houses that otherwise would have been for sale. That, in turn, put pressure on apartment rents.
For the Alexan Midtown to compete, it would need to offer residents more for their money, including state-of-the-art technology that would appeal to the young medical and government professionals that were still its target market. That was especially true because of the Midtown price point – studios were advertised for just under $1,400 a month,
Property developers beat the recession With Fiber
The Alexan Midtown in Sacramento has “the real deal” – an all-fiber-optic network.
summer 2012 | www.bbcmag.com | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | What Fiber Broadband Can Do For Your Community | 29
Property developers beat the recession With Fiber
When service providers advertise “fiber rich,” “fiber deep” and
“fiber optic” networks, how do you know whether you’re really
getting fiber to the home? In 2006, the FTTH Councils for
Europe, Asia and North America standardized the definitions
for fiber to the home and fiber to the building (also called fiber
to the basement). They are:
Fiber to the home (Ftth)A fiber optic communications path that extends from an operator’s switching
equipment to at least the boundary of a home living space or business office space. The definition excludes architectures in which the optical fiber terminates
before reaching either a home living space or business office space and the access
path continues over a physical medium other than optical fiber.
Fiber to the buildiNg (Fttb)A fiber optic communications path that extends from an operator’s switching
equipment to at least the boundary of a private property that encloses homes or businesses. The optical fiber terminates before reaching home living spaces
or business office spaces. The access path then continues over another access
medium, such as copper or wireless, to subscribers.
Only FTTH is truly unlimited, but FTTB can provide as much capacity as most
households and small businesses can use today.
Some “Fiber” NetWorkS Are Not Fiber to the home Other network architectures are not officially defined. Their capacity depends on
how far users are from nodes and/or on the number of users on each node.
Fiber to the Node or Fiber to the Neighborhood (FttN)In an FTTN network, fiber is extended to a street cabinet or an on-pole cabinet
within 1,000 to 5,000 feet of the average user. From there, copper or wireless serves
users, typically through a variant of DSL (Digital Subscriber Line).
Fiber to the curb or Fiber to the cAbiNet (Fttc)FTTC is similar to FTTN, except that the fiber is brought closer to user premises –
typically closer than 1,000 feet and often closer than 300 feet.
hybrid Fiber-coAx (hFc)This architecture is used mainly by cable TV companies. In a typical HFC system,
fiber runs to a node in each neighborhood, and coaxial cable running from the
node serves between 100 and 500 users.
is it really Fiber to the home?more than double the rent of other entry-
level digs in the area.One differentiator materialized by
chance. Because the aesthetics of the project called for existing overhead cables to be buried underground, Hester got to work contacting the owners of those cables. One happened to be Roseville, Calif.-based SureWest, an independent ILEC that has been aggressively rolling out IP-based services in Northern California.
SureWest started offering IP-based HDTV as early as 2006 in the greater Sacramento area and already had a fiber ring running right past the Alexan site.
“I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and that almost never happens, where there’s actually existing fiber fronting the property,” Hester says. “If it does happen, you usually can’t tap into it because it’s for 911 or a hospital or someone else’s dedicated use. But in this case, we had SureWest right there, and they were only too happy to serve the property.”
Because the property already had fiber running literally to its door, the developer decided to make an investment for the future and take the fiber path all the way to all units, offering data speeds up to 50 Mbps. “Oftentimes, people talk about having a fiber network. But I think … that term has gotten watered down, just as the term ‘organic’ has been overused in the food industry. Nobody knows what it means anymore,” Hester says. “But at the Alexan, we have the real deal. This is a pure fiber system. As far as we can tell, no one else in the market can say that.” The project has been a success for SureWest, which quickly signed up 55 percent of the project’s tenants. And it has been a success for Trammell Crow as well. v
campaigns to send FTTH primers to every household and business.
“The primer is an EX WAY to not only EDU E people about the basics of FTTH but also IN ORM them
of its MANY BENE
CELLENCA
FFIT
TT
S.” —mark erickson
City administrator and economic development director - winthrop, minn.
Get more information or place your request for a bulk shipment of printed primers for your community at:
www.FTTHPrimer.com
Printed FTTH primers are helping thousands in communitiesget on the same page about the benefits of fiber networks.
FTTH marketing campaigns use vol-unteers, both adults and children, to reach every household and business in a project area.
Besides the primer, mailing packets in-clude brochures, questionnaires and schedules of public meetings about fiber networks.
• DISCOVER THE FACTORS IN BROADBAND SUCCESS:Learnhowonce-devastedtownsandcitiesaresuccessfullydeployingfibernetworkswhileothersstrugglewithfinancialandotherchallenges
• EXAMINE IMPORTANT COMMUNITY BROADBAND ISSUES:Pros,consandsuccessstoriesofopenaccessnetworks…insightsoncollaborationamongcommunities…contributionsofcommunitybroadbandleadersandchampions…therolesofserviceprovidersandvendors
register now for:Economic Development Conference Series
www.TownsAndTech.com
At one time Danville, Va., had the highest unemployment in the state. TodayDanvilleisattractingnewjobsandthebusinessesoftomorrow.
Its fiber network has played a key role in the town’s revitalization.
Who Should Attend:Leaders and Officials, including:
Mayors•CityManagers•CityCouncilMembers•RegionalPlanningAdministrators•CountyManagersandAdministrators• County Commissioners and Supervisors • County IT Directors • Public Safety Directors • Economic DevelopmentAdministrators•CountyAttorneysSchoolOfficials•NetworkAnalysts•BroadbandActivists•Educators•ChamberofCommerceMembers•BusinessLeaders•Investors
Program Chairman:JimBaller–TheBallerHerbstLawGroup,PC
ConferenceSiteInstituteforAdvancedLearning
andResearch,Danville,Va.
campaigns to send FTTH primers to every household and business.
“The primer is an EX WAY to not only EDU E people about the basics of FTTH but also IN ORM them
of its MANY BENE
CELLENCA
FFIT
TT
S.” —mark erickson
City administrator and economic development director - winthrop, minn.
Get more information or place your request for a bulk shipment of printed primers for your community at:
www.FTTHPrimer.com
Printed FTTH primers are helping thousands in communitiesget on the same page about the benefits of fiber networks.
Danville’s Powerful ComebaCk strategy
November 8–9, 2012
Why Attend the Conference?• FIND OUT HOW FIBER NETWORKS ARE REVITALIZING THE SOUTHEASTERN U.S.:Benefitfromtheexperiencesof
• DISCOVER THE FACTORS IN BROADBAND SUCCESS:Learnhowonce-devastedtownsandcitiesaresuccessfullydeployingfibernetworkswhileothersstrugglewithfinancialandotherchallenges
• EXAMINE IMPORTANT COMMUNITY BROADBAND ISSUES:Pros,consandsuccessstoriesofopenaccessnetworks…insightsoncollaborationamongcommunities…contributionsofcommunitybroadbandleadersandchampions…therolesofserviceprovidersandvendors
register now for:Economic Development Conference Series
www.TownsAndTech.com
At one time Danville, Va., had the highest unemployment in the state. TodayDanvilleisattractingnewjobsandthebusinessesoftomorrow.
Its fiber network has played a key role in the town’s revitalization.
Who Should Attend:Leaders and Officials, including:
Mayors•CityManagers•CityCouncilMembers•RegionalPlanningAdministrators•CountyManagersandAdministrators• County Commissioners and Supervisors • County IT Directors • Public Safety Directors • Economic DevelopmentAdministrators•CountyAttorneysSchoolOfficials•NetworkAnalysts•BroadbandActivists•Educators•ChamberofCommerceMembers•BusinessLeaders•Investors
Program Chairman:JimBaller–TheBallerHerbstLawGroup,PC
ConferenceSiteInstituteforAdvancedLearning
andResearch,Danville,Va.
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M
Y
CM
MY
CY
CMY
K
®
"Opelika Power Services chose AEG as our Design and Construction partner for the deployment of our FTTH/Smart Grid network in December of 2010. We chose AEG based on
their extensive experience and reputation within the industry. Their team has not let us down, they truly have served as an advocate for our success.”
Mayor Gary Fuller
City of Opelika, Alabama
PO Box 790 Braselton, GA 30517 706-654-2298
www.atlanticinc.cc Business Development Contact: Chris Smith
as industry members gather in Dallas for the 2012 FTTH Con-ference & Expo, it is apparent
that the past several years of progress in deploying all-fiber, next-generation net-works in North America have brought FTTH to a crossroads. The conference theme for this year is The Future is Now – but where, exactly, is the industry headed?
FTTH has been on a steady march beginning with the deployment of the first FTTH networks about 15 years ago and progressing to the establishment of the FTTH Council in 2001, the ramp-ing up of the Verizon FiOS deployment around 2004–2005 and the launch of the broadband stimulus program in 2009.
Today, FTTH networks are avail-able to more than 20 percent of homes in North America, and more than 8 million homes are connected to fiber. The vast majority of these are in the United States, but Canadian opera-tors are now moving forward, with Bell Aliant leading the way in the Atlantic provinces. Now Latin America appears poised to get on the bandwagon, with nearly a dozen large carriers in that re-gion deploying all-fiber networks.
To date, companies building fiber to the home have been leading demand rather than responding to enormous demand from their subscribers. Indeed, FCC studies have found that the vast ma-jority of broadband subscribers have no idea of the level of bandwidth provided to their homes and are generally satisfied.
The network operators that have de-ployed FTTH in North America – and the council has counted nearly a thou-sand of them – looked beyond the hori-zon and realized that “future-proofing”
with end-to-end fiber is a good decision from both an engineering and a business perspective.
NearING THe TIppING poINT I sense that the industry may be nearing the tipping point at which the consumer demand side of the equation begins to assert itself more forcefully, drawing closer to the day when the vast major-ity of broadband subscribers will settle for nothing less than fiber running all the way to their homes – just as most consumers today will not accept dial-up service.
Past predictions of global IP traffic growth continue to bear out, and fore-casts continue to be adjusted upward. According to Cisco, global IP traffic in-creased eightfold over the last five years and will increase threefold over the next five years. Driving this phenomenon is video over the Internet, which began taking off after YouTube’s founding in 2005 and accelerated rapidly in the past couple of years – eclipsing P2P, which a
few years ago was forecast to overwhelm the Internet.
Today, increasing numbers of con-sumers are finding ways to get the pro-grams they want “over the top” through Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and a range of other Internet video options. This year, for the first time, NBC Sports showed all Olympic competitions and medal ceremonies live over the Internet in the United States.
Internet video streams to the TV doubled in 2011; during peak usage hours, Netflix accounts for as much as 30 percent of all Internet traffic. Cisco predicts that Internet video will account for 54 percent of all consumer Internet traffic in 2016.
The FTTH Council’s market analysis firm, RVA LLC, tracked per-household bandwidth demand among broadband users – including users of FTTH and other access technologies – and found that total average peak bandwidth de-mand now exceeds 40 Mbps, three times what it was just five years ago.
The Future Is Fiber
By Heather Burnett Gold ■ President, FTTH Council Americas
The day isn’t far off when broadband subscribers will settle for nothing less than fiber to the home.
To date, network operators have led demand by deploying FTTH in North America. Soon, the
consumer demand side of the equation will begin to assert itself more forcefully.
about the authorHeather Burnett Gold is president of the FTTH Council Americas, a nonprofit as-sociation of organizations that deliver services over FTTH networks, companies that manufacture FTTH products and others involved in planning and building FTTH networks. She can be reached at [email protected].
I am convinced this demand will continue to grow, driven by the increas-ing number of devices in homes, many of them simultaneously drawing band-width through the same in-home router. People with multiple devices used to be called “bandwidth hogs,” but it is no longer unusual to walk into a home and find one family member watching a Netflix movie on the Roku box and another playing an interactive video game over the Internet on a computer or TV-connected gaming device while a third person is engaged in a Skype or FaceTime video call and music streams from Pandora or iTunes Radio on the household sound system.
WIreless aND cable caN’T keep UpThe fact that many of these devices are mobile helps propagate the myth that the “world is going wireless.” But it’s not really wireless, is it? You can’t use Face-Time on an iPhone unless you are con-nected to Wi-Fi. Just the other day, stuck in an airport after a missed connection, I tried downloading three favorite TV episodes on my 4G-connected mobile device, and the first one took an hour to finish. When I got home and logged onto my FiOS-powered Wi-Fi connec-tion, the remaining two episodes down-loaded in a grand total of four minutes. There are real doubts that wireless from towers can ever deliver bandwidth that can meet typical household needs.
Though most consumers focus on downstreaming content, the need for greater upload speeds is becoming ap-parent as more applications and services come to market – two-way videocon-ferencing, video sharing, cloud backup, new software-as-a-service applications and the increasing need to send large files from home offices. Traditional ca-ble companies have expanded download services to 100 Mbps or higher in some markets, but their upload bandwidth is not showing much movement from the 1 Mbps typical for cable modem Internet service. FTTH Council experts doubt the DOCSIS platform can ever deliver more than 15 Mbps for uploading.
When the National Broadband Plan was devised two years ago, its stated goal
was “100 squared” – that is, 100 Mbps to 100 million homes in the United States by 2020. In the short time since then, communities have begun to won-der whether 100 Mbps will be enough. A report by the FTTH Council earlier this year predicted that by the end of 2012, more than 20 U.S. service pro-viders will likely offer gigabit service – following in the footsteps of council members EPB Chattanooga, Sonic.net in California and Google Fiber in Kan-sas City, which drew interest from more than a thousand communities across the United States.
proGress IN reacHING NexT-GeN broaDbaND The goal of the council is to help com-panies and organizations – from local telephone and cable companies to com-munity groups, civic organizations and broadband advocates – better under-stand the value of FTTH for economic progress, education, health, and qual-ity of life and chart their own courses to next-generation, all-fiber broadband. For some communities, access to fiber is a matter of survival.
There is progress on several fronts:
• A number of council members are working with the university com-munity innovation project Gig.U on its efforts to bring ultra-high-speed broadband to university communi-ties. Recently, Gig.U announced a collaboration with FTTH Council member Gigabit Squared on a $200 million project to roll out FTTH in six university communities. Mean-while, council members GWI and GRUcom are involved in Gig.U ini-tiatives in Maine and Florida.
• Many Council members joined the U.S. Ignite Partnership, which seeks to stitch together existing high-band-width networks to create a national test-bed network to demonstrate
next-generation applications. The ini-tiative, backed by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, will facilitate implementa-tion of next-generation applications to transform advanced manufactur-ing, clean energy, education and workforce technologies, emergency preparedness and public safety, and health information technologies.
• The FTTH Council, at the Sep-tember conference, will launch an FTTH online toolkit that will serve as a resource center for any company or community that wants to move forward on deploying FTTH. The toolkit will make available valu-able information and assistance to broadband providers, business ex-ecutives and civic leaders on how to plan, build and operate an FTTH network. Included in the online resources will be information on partnership organizations and grant sources on a state-by-state basis, in-formation on project financing, tem-plates for RFPs tailored to specific community needs, success stories and case studies, and other infor-mation on fiber technologies and deployment techniques. The toolkit was created by a team of collabora-tors using a wiki platform, and we are excited about the opportunity to share it with the public.
I believe these efforts are just the tip of the iceberg. Over the next two to three years, I expect to see a much wider effort to move North America and Latin America toward ubiquitous all-fiber ac-cess. Looking at how far broadband has come over the past 10 years – from dial-up as the norm to Internet video on multiple devices in the home – gives me a real sense of excitement about what the next decade will bring.
This is a great time to be associated with the fiber-to-the-home industry. v
The FTTH Council’s new online toolkit will serve as a resource center for any company or community that wants to move forward on deploying FTTH.
1:00 pm – 1:45 pm Track Session T-303-G – FTTP on a Shoestring– Peter Folk, Gargoyle Technologies Inc.
1:00 pm – 1:45 pm Track Session T-304-G – Title to be announced– Dennis V. Rose, CHR Solutions Inc.
1:00 pm – 2:15 pm PAN300 – FTTH Progress and Impact in AmericasModerator: David St. John, Principal, St. John CommunicationsPanelists:– Michael Render, President, RVA LLC– Roland Montagne, Director Telecoms Business Unit, IDATE
2:15 pm – 6:30 pm EXPO Grand Opening in Expo Hall
5:00 pm – 6:30 pm Opening Reception in EXPO Hall
TUesDaY, sepTeMber 25, 2012
7:00 am – 5:00 pm Registration Open
7:00 am – 8:00 am Continental Breakfast
8:00 am – 10:00 am Opening General SessionArmchair Discussion
Moderator: Tom Cohen, Counsel to the FTTH Council Americas and Parter, Kelley Drye & Warren LLPSpeakers: – Mark Ansboury, President, Gigabit Squared– Gary Evans, President and CEO, Hiawatha Broadband
Communications Inc.– Frank Latini, Technical Services Manager, Gainesville
Regional Utilities
Keynotes– Jonathan S. Adelstein, Administrator, Rural Utilities Service,
United States Department of Agriculture– Robert (Bob) Mudge, President of Consumer and Mass
Business Markets, Verizon
10:00 am – 10:15 am Refreshment Break, Networking
10:15 am – 11:30 am KEYPAN – Service Provider Success Stories Panel Moderator: Kim Hartwell, Senior Vice President, Carrier Networks and Customer Experience, Corning Cable Systems
Panelists:– Bob Perry, Director OSP Eng. & Construction, North State
Communications– Frank P. Caruso, Director of Information Technology,
Borough of Kutztown, Pa.– Katie Espeseth, Vice President, EPB Fiber Optics– George O’Neal – Vice President Network Services, GVTC
11:30 am – 1:00 pm Buffet Lunch in EXPO Hall
11:30 am – 3:00 pm EXPO Hall Opens
3:00 pm – 5:00 pm FTTH Council Global Alliance Meeting (Closed session)
3:15 pm – 4:00 pm Track Session T-401-G – New Era for Fiber Termination Technology in FTTH
– David Z. Chen, Verizon Global Network Operations and Engineering
3:15 pm – 4:00 pm Track Session T-402-G – Streamlining the Design-build Process for FTTx Build-outs with Field Validation Tools
– Robert Laudati, SPATIALinfo Inc.
3:15 pm – 4:00 pm Track Session T-403-G – The Killer App: Economic Development and Job Creation
3:15 pm – 4:00 pm Track Session T-405-G – Gestión eficiente del inventario de la red FTTx
– Miguel Alfredo Tamburini Pasache, Telefónica Chile
3:15 pm – 6:15 pm PAN400 – Smart Grid PanelModerator: Scott Jackson, National Business Development Manager – Smart Grid, Graybar Electric Company
Smart Grid TechnologiesPanelists:– Scott Jackson, National Business Development Manager –
Smart Grid, Graybar Electric Company– Rob Falkner, Principal Consultant, Alcatel-Lucent– Eric Murray, Chief Executive Officer, Tantalus– Ron Zimmer, President & CEO, Continental Automated
Buildings Association (CABA)
Benefits of the Smart Grid – Provider & Utility Deployments and Best Practices
4:15 pm – 5:00 pm Track Session T-501-I – Options for Solving the New Fiber-in-the-Home Challenge
– Mark Boxer, OFS
4:15 pm – 5:00 pm Track Session T-502-I – Distributed Split Architecture with Optical Demarcation for Rural FTTx Deployments
– Roger Vaughn, AFL Telecommunications LLC
4:15 pm – 5:00 pm Track Session T-503-G – Big Pipe or Big Drain: Business Decisions
– John D. Andrews, US SONET LLC
4:15 pm – 5:00 pm Track Session T-505-G – O&M de Planta externa en las Redes FTTH, desarrolladas en infraestructura compartida con las redes de FO estándar
– René Rodriguez Paez, Manager OAM, ENTEL
5:15 pm – 6:00 pm Track Session T-601-G – Driving Down the Cost of Connecting While Enhancing Customer Experience
– Keith Russell, Alcatel-Lucent
5:15 pm – 6:00 pm Track Session T-602-I – Consolidated Passive Optical Networks in the MDU: Design Considerations, Costs and Benefits
– Bill Cune, Corning Cable Systems
5:15 pm – 6:00 pm Track Session T-603-G –No Field of Dreams: Eliminating the Waiting Game and Driving Network Uptake
– Michael Curri, Founder and President, Strategic Networks Group
5:15 pm – 6:15 pm PAN 600 - LATAM PanelModerator: Gilberto (GG) Guitarte, Broadband Connectivity Director, LATAM, TE Connectivity
Panelists:– Gustavo Welkner, CTO, GTD Manquehue– Victor Raul Rangel Aguilar, Director of Telco Evolution and
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 20127:00 am – 1:00 pm Registration Open
7:00 am – 8:00 am Refreshment Break, Networking, Poster Sessions
8:00 am – 8:45 am Track Session T-701-G – Leveraging Passive Optical Components to Maximize Network
– Tim Badar, TE Connectivity
8:00 am – 8:45 am Track Session T-702-I – Exploring a New and Innovative FTTH Testing Approach
– Olivier Plomteux, EXFO Inc.
8:00 am – 8:45 am Track Session T-703-G – Rural FTTH Success Story: Operational Best Practices
– Bill Shreffler, Pulse Broadband
8:00 am – 8:45 am Track Session T-704-A – Next-Generation Application Deployment: Cracking the Municipal Fiber Nut
– Todd Marriott, UTOPIA
8:00 am – 8:45 am Track Session T-705-I – Reducing the Cost of Fiber Deployment with Pushable Fiber
– Scot Bohaychyk, Clearfield Inc.
9:00 am – 10:15 am PAN 700 – Carrier PanelModerator: Tim Pillow, Senior VP, Global Sales & Marketing, OFS
Panelists:– Christopher D. Levendos, Executive Director – Strategic
Initiatives & Performance Management, Verizon– Rafael Sgrott Martins, Manager – Planning and
Deployment FTTH, Telefonica-SA– Barry J. Walton, Senior Advisor – Access FTTH, Bell Aliant
10:15 am – 12:45 pm EXPO Hall Open
1:00 pm – 4:00 pm Closing General Session and LuncheonKeynote: Joe Candido, President, Fifth Element Associates Inc.
FTTXcellence Award
FTTH Council Group Alliance (FCGA) PanelModerator: Joe Candido, President, Fifth Element Associates Inc.Panelists:– FTTH Councils America, LATAM, Europe, MENA, APAC and
Africa
FTTH Enabled Applications – Armchair DiscussionModerator: Heather Burnett Gold, President, FTTH Council AmericasPanelists:– John Goodman, President & CEO, AVU Media– Peter Macedo, Director, Institute for Distance and
ADTRAN Inc. is a global supplier of advanced network infrastructure and converged com-munications solu-tions. ADTRAN is reinventing access with a broad port-folio of solutions used throughout
the global communications infrastructure. We develop innova-tive systems using IP/Ethernet architectures for both wireline and wireless media. Our solutions enable video deployments, broadband expansion, Ethernet service delivery and converged network services while providing the value required by today’s demanding service providers. Visit us at FTTH booth #333 or on the Web at www.adtran.com/access.
advanced Media Technologies www.amt.com
Advanced Media Tech-nologies Inc. (AMT) is the performance leader among CATV and broadband electronic equipment providers. As a value-added reseller of high-performance products from numerous well-known manufacturers, AMT targets emerg-ing technology applications in broadband with a complete line of products for CATV, IPTV and FTTH. AMT’s complete portfolio of broadband equipment includes products from Motorola, Amino, Blonder Tongue, ZeeVee, ATX Networks, EGT, RGB Networks, Adtec, Drake, Olson Technology and Emcore. AMT specializes in prebuilt headends that range from small DSS systems to fully digital, high-definition headends.
atlantic engineering Groupwww.aeg.cc
In 17 years of experience, At-lantic Engineering Group has completed the design and/or
build of more than 100 fiber optic networks, including more than 30 FTTH and/or smart-grid deployments. Our clients include municipalities, utilities, cooperatives and govern-ment agencies. We provide clients with end-to-end design, construction and turn-up services for their fiber and smart- grid needs.
aurora NetworksBooth #119www.aurora.com
Aurora Networks, the number one optical transport solutions provider for cable operators, is evolving networks by focusing on innovative solutions that prepare networks to accommodate subscriber services of today and tomorrow. Aurora Networks delivers unique solutions, such as end-to-end PON and Node PON solutions to help operators cost-effectively deliver all op-tical IP and Ethernet-based services to residential and com-mercial customers.
charles Industries ltd.Booth #232www.charlesindustries.com
Charles supplies a compre-hensive line of innovative enclosed solutions for fiber, copper, wireless, CATV and utility applications. Charles nonmetallic buried fiber dis-tribution pedestals, cross-connects and flexibility point pedes-tals offer flexible, easily deployed fiber distribution of virtually all cable types and connectors. Charles Universal Broadband Enclosures (CUBE) are customizable metallic cabinets that house integrated electronics at cell sites, MDUs, strip malls, business parks, smart grids and other remote applications. In 2012, Charles greatly expanded its fiber building terminal product line with many new models and sizes of indoor and outdoor fiber interconnects and hubs, ideal for fiber-to-the-MDU and other multiuser applications. Charles Industries has been named to Broadband Communities’ list of the Top 100 FTTH Companies for seven consecutive years. Its four U.S. manufacturing locations and headquarters in Rolling Mead-ows, Ill., are ISO 9001 and TL 9000 registered. The company continues to support Broadband Recovery Act project award-ees through its successful “Stimulus Starts Here” program.
FEATURED EXHIBITORS AT THE FTTH CONFERENCE To connect with companies that have no booth number listed,
Clearfield Inc. solves the puzzle of fiber networking while setting the standard for fiber performance and lowering the cost of broadband deployment. Clearfield’s FieldSmart Fiber Management platform is the industry’s only fiber management solution based upon a single architecture, protecting every fiber as it moves from the inside plant, through the outside plant and the access network and all the way to the home. With the Clearview Cassette and Clearview xPAK at its heart, FieldSmart delivers a value proposition that scales from small town to large enterprise – and now, with pushable fiber drop-cable systems and fiber-optimized pedestal and field en-closure solutions, Clearfield offers the market’s lowest total cost of ownership.
comcast corporationwww.xfinity.comcast.net
Comcast Corporation is one of the world’s leading media, entertainment and commu-nications companies. Comcast is principally involved in oper-ating cable systems and in developing, producing and distrib-uting entertainment, news, sports and other content for global audiences through NBCUniversal. Delivered over Comcast’s enhanced all-digital network, XFINITY from Comcast is TV, Internet, phone and home management all working together to provide your residents with instant entertainment and connec-tion – anywhere, anytime, on any screen.
Corning Cable Systems, part of Corning’s telecommunications segment, is a leading manufacturer of fiber optic communica-tions system solutions for voice, data and video network ap-plications worldwide.
We offer the broadest range of end-to-end fiber optic prod-uct solutions for customers’ telecommunications networks. We put companies at the forefront of network innovation, pioneer-ing many of the global products and solutions commonly used in state-of-the-art cabling systems.
Corning Cable Systems Solutions for Fiber-to-the-x (FTTx) Networks is a comprehensive offering of tip-to-tip products and services, including the most advanced suite of optical fiber technologies, photonic components and optical networking devices available. Integrated CAD and flexible manufacturing processes deliver innovative, turnkey solutions in collabora-tive partnerships with our OEM customers. Backed by award-winning customer service, engineering services and technical support, Corning Cable Systems Solutions enable network ser-vice providers to quickly and cost-effectively deploy fiber to the home and business.
Fiber Instrument Sales Inc., lo-cated in Oriskany, N.Y., is a lead-ing distributor and manufacturer of hundreds of fiber optic products, including cable assemblies, connectors and test equipment. The company employs 250 indi-viduals and serves customers throughout the United States and in some 110 countries. With one of the world’s largest invento-ries of fiber optic products, FIS consistently provides customers with quick turnaround of their orders as they access a multitude of products from a variety of industry-leading manufacturers.
FIS is also renowned for its technical expertise and offers prompt responses to customers’ questions and concerns. FIS University, the company’s highly respected fiber optic train-ing division, has tutored tens of thousands in the fiber optics industry, both domestically and internationally. FIS University offers BICSI continuing education credits and ETA certifica-tion. Many FIS customers also take advantage of the company’s expansive rental and leasing options, which provide the best equipment and supplies from a diverse group of manufacturers.
G4S Technology (formerly Ad-esta) specializes in the design and implementation of modern com-munications networks and infrastructure for public and pri-vate customers. A trusted provider of facilities, equipment and personnel for a wide variety of communications infrastructure, we offer custom-tailored, results-oriented services in SONET, IP/Ethernet, DWDM/CWDM, wireless, last-mile and broad-band networks.
Since 1988, G4S Technology has deployed more than 2 million fiber miles. We can help develop a greenfield network or integrate into an existing infrastructure. We work with in-side- and outside-plant facilities and provide all types of net-works for voice, data and video applications. Our wide service range includes design, engineering, cable and equipment pro-curement, aerial and underground installation, construction, system testing and turn-up, fusion splicing and documentation.
G4S Technology is a founding Fiber to the Home Council member specializing in last-mile and broadband solutions for ILECs, CLECs, utilities, municipalities, economic develop-ment projects and rural broadband cooperatives.
GlDsBooth #445 www.glds.com
A Broadband Communities FTTH Top 100 company, GLDS sets the standard for cable billing and subscriber manage-ment software. WinCable’s client-server architec-
ture, attractive Windows design and robust SQL database pro-vide optimal features, benefits and value for smaller operators.
Digital, IPTV and analog set-top boxes; FTTH ONUs; conditional access; satellite receivers; cable modems; VoD; OTT and VoIP can all be managed directly from the Win-Cable billing system. GLDS also offers telephone and Web-en-abled customer self-care, plus workforce management solutions from any Web-enabled device.
• Designed for the requirements of private, franchise and municipal broadband
• Exclusive address-based features• Full support for interdiction, FTTH, digital, IPTV, VoIP
and more• Landlord/tenant billing options• Low-cost online solutions for small systems
Serving small and midsized operators, GLDS has imple-mented its solutions for more than 300 cable systems in 49 U.S. states and 44 countries. For more information, contact GLDS Sales at 800-882-7950 or visit www.glds.com
Jameson www.jamesonllc.com
Since 1956, Jameson has manufactured tools for tele-communications, tree care, CATV, power utilities and the military.
We specialize in inside wiring, underground cable pulling and locating, aerial cable construction and line clearance. Our diverse product line includes fiberglass conduit rodders and fish tapes, traceable rodders, glow fish rods, work lights, splicer scissors and knives, fiberglass layup sticks, line clearance tools and aerial cable placement tools.
Matrix Design GroupBooth #548www.matrixdg.com
Matrix Design Group stands above our competition in net-work engineering and design of fiber optic technology solu-tions. Our highly skilled management team is well equipped to handle your project from concept to completion. We are prepared to plan, design, build, manage and support your broadband project with unparalleled excellence and continu-
ity of service. Our staff of fiber optic network technicians offer unmatched professionalism through a stringent quality control program. Together, the Matrix team is poised to manage and deliver your project with the utmost level of service and reli-ability through the use of the latest equipment, technology and dedicated personnel.
Mesh Networks, Thewww.themeshnetworks.com
The Mesh Networks, an expert in the field of bandwidth manage-ment since 2005, is a provider of innovative, state-of-the-art broadband management solutions. With the development of the NetProfit platform of products, The Mesh Networks provides broadband providers and administrators with powerful new capabilities for managing their customers’ Internet experiences.
The Mesh Networks provides true dynamic bandwidth on demand for Internet users. NetProfit increases existing pipe utilization by up to 45 percent (reducing future broadband growth costs as well), improves quality of service, provides powerful accounting and management reporting tools, offers end users a reporting/usage tracking option and provides net-work owners and managers with additional revenue from exist-ing services where appropriate.
Visit our website today to see how the NetProfit and Quota Defender Systems can increase your bottom line today! Contact us about our NO-RISK evalua-tion program at [email protected] or give us a call at 855.855.MESH.
Headquartered in Orlando, Fla., since 1982, Multicom is a full-line stocking distributor and manufacturer of products used for end-to-end integration of voice, data and video over fiber, coax and copper. The company has a multimillion-dollar inven-tory of more than 13,000 products from more than 270 of the world’s major manufacturers and provides all active and passive components required for complete FTTH end-to-end solutions.
At Multicom, you will find a complete GPON solution from one trusted source. Multicom provides OLTs, indoor and out-door ONTs, transmitters, EDFAs, splitters, fiber optic cables, racks, patch panels and more for your GPON application – plus the experience and knowledge to put it all together. The com-pany’s newest addition to its fiber optic product line is a high-power CATV mininode, a high-performance HFC node for use in CATV/MDU applications. It supports HFC services and content such as DOCSIS 1, 2, or 3, and high-definition video.
Multicom also sells retail and wholesale VoIP services through its Mconnect subsidiary and provides a complete HDTV hos-pitality solution that includes a 24/7 active monitoring and is-sue resolution application accessible from a smartphone. Mul-ticom maintains sales offices, rep agencies and subdistributors throughout the Americas. For more information, call Multicom at 800-423-2594 or email [email protected].
North american cable equipmentwww.northamericancable.com
NACE is a manufacturer and distributor of products that serve the satellite television, security, networking, fiber optic and home theatre markets. NACE was incorporated in 1992 and over 20 years has grown its product families through dealer and distributor sales. The company’s product divisions include Cabletronix, Securitytronix, Fiber-tronix, Symphonic Designs and Datatronix. It operates stock-ing warehouse locations in Pennsylvania, Missouri and Nevada and has fully staffed technical labs in its Pennsylvania and Nevada locations with 24/7 support access in both locations. NACE is a master system operator for DIRECTV lodging and commercial property programming sales through its extensive dealer network. For all information regarding NACE, please visit our website at www.northamericancable.com or contact our national sales team toll free at 800-688-9282.
power & Tel Booth #444www.ptsupply.com
Power & Tel specializes in the procurement, sales and materi-als management of communications products. Our extensive distribution network provides groups such as service provid-ers and contractors a critical link between their network needs and manufacturers’ solutions for them. Power & Tel’s portfolio includes products and solutions for broadband access, CATV, cellular backhaul, FTTx, home networking, IPTV, optical networks, outside plant, testing and much more. Utilizing our supply chain experience and technology enables you to focus on your strengths instead of managing the costs of handling inventory. 2013 marks 50 years of doing business for Power & Tel. We are proud of this milestone but even more proud to serve as a supply chain partner to this industry.
preformed line productsBooth #225www.prefomed.com
Founded in 1947, Preformed Line Products is an international designer and manufacturer of products and systems employed in the construction and maintenance of overhead and under-
ground networks for energy, communications, broadband and solar power. Headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, the company operates manufacturing centers in Rogers, Ark.; Albuquerque, N.M.; and Albemarle, N.C. PLP serves worldwide markets through international operations in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, England, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, South Africa, Spain and Thailand.
Time Warner cablewww.twc.com
Time Warner Cable Com-munity Solutions is dedi-cated to the multifamily and student housing business segments. We partner with multi-family and student housing professionals to enable them in ex-ceeding their goals and enhancing their businesses. Providing our customers with cutting-edge TV, Internet and phone is our core business, not just an ancillary product, as is the case for some of our competitors. We have all the bandwidth needed to support your residents’ high-tech lifestyles, and we are al-ways inventing better ways for you to share it. Your residents will enjoy the latest innovations, from high-definition televi-sion to enhanced features such as TV Everywhere – watch live streams from ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN U, ESPN Buzzer Beater and ESPN3.com on any computer. Make any room a TV room with TWC TV and watch live TV in your home on your tablet or smartphone. Plus, access Whole House DVR and Whole House on Demand – begin watching a show in one room and continue in another room.
ViamediaBooth #459www.viamedia.com
Viamedia is a leading provider of outsourced local advertising sales services. The company specializes in selling DMA-based advertising to local, regional and national advertisers on behalf of U.S. cable and telecommunications service providers, utility companies and municipalities. For more information on Via-media, visit www.viamediatv.com.
Walker and associatesBooth #358www.walkerfirst.com
Walker and Associates is the premier source of telecommuni-cations products for network operators, simplifying network deployments with expert installation, systems integration and unsurpassed sourcing services. Since 1970, Walker has re-mained an aggressive industry leader, offering products and solutions that support leading-edge technologies such as Ether-net switching, Ethernet routing, GPON, active Ethernet, DSL, microwave, Ethernet demarcation, VoIP, WDM, ROADM, packet optical networking and more. Walker provides these solutions to wireline and wireless service providers of all sizes. Walker continues to seek new products and technologies that
aDTraN powers United communications’ broadband Upgrade
Total Access 5000 enables innovative carrier to scale services in-frastructure to deliver high-value video, data, gaming and voice
HUNTSVILLE, AL – ADTRAN Inc., a leading provider of next-generation networking solutions, announced that its To-tal Access 5000 broadband platform is enabling United Com-munications to upgrade its network to deliver high-bandwidth, triple-play services to its subscriber base in central Tennessee. With over 20,000 access lines deployed, United Communica-tions is now able to deliver a rich set of fiber-to-the-home ser-vices, including video, voice and data, that rival any found in any metro network across the country.
United Communications chose ADTRAN to meet the growing demand from residential and business customers for next-generation services such as IPTV and to increase network bandwidth for popular activities such as online gaming, photo sharing and video streaming and for critical business commu-nications. One advantage of leveraging ADTRAN’s Total Ac-cess 5000 for this broadband deployment is that United Com-munications is now able to perform this upgrade over both its existing copper and its new fiber infrastructures, scale higher-value services quickly and reach a broader set of customers with these advanced services.
The flexible and innovative design of ADTRAN’s broad-band access platform allows United Communications to eco-nomically address both legacy and next-generation services. By reducing loop lengths to maximize the performance of the VDSL and ADSL2+ copper access technologies in their net-work, United Communications can deliver ultra-broadband speeds over its copper infrastructure with ADTRAN’s Total Access 1100 series sealed fiber-to-the-node broadband access solutions. The combination of the Total Access 1100 series and the Total Access 5000 platform gives United Communications a migration path toward a converged network architecture that will reduce both capital and operational expenses moving for-
ward. As United Communications continues to deploy even more fiber in their network, it is now able to expand the avail-ability of faster broadband speeds of up to 10 Gbps, all from a single platform. The Total Access 5000 system functions as a full-featured FTTH and FTTN aggregator and a flexible ac-cess platform that enables United Communications to meet a
NEWS FROM FEATURED EXHIBITORS
will aid in building network infrastructure and allowing up-grades of the embedded base of equipment for higher speeds of broadband service delivery.
Walker’s services help reduce costs associated with install-ing and maintaining equipment at customer locations. The company assists customers in solving business challenges and increasing their ability to meet customer expectations of tele-communications service providers.
zhone Technologies Inc. Booth #353www.zhone.com
Zhone Technologies Inc. is a global leader in all-IP multiservice access solutions, serv-ing more than 750 of the world’s most innovative network op-erators. The IP Zhone is the only solution that enables service providers to build the network of the future today, supporting end-to-end voice, data, entertainment, social media, business, mobile backhaul and mobility services. Zhone is committed to building the fastest and highest-quality all-IP multiservice solutions for our customers. Zhone is headquartered in Cali-fornia, and its products are manufactured in the United States in a facility that is emission, wastewater and CFC free.
variety of legacy and emerging service requirements while ac-commodating growth in its network.
“We have offered voice and data services to our customers for a while now, but when we looked at adding a complete triple-play offering to meet our subscriber demand, we found that our old solution wasn’t scalable and could not reach across our entire footprint,” said William Bradford, president and CEO, United Communications. “ADTRAN’s broadband access solutions not only give us the bandwidth we need today but also provide a migration path forward that allows us to stay competitive in our market in the long run. The personal attention and support ADTRAN gave us during our upgrade enabled us to design, test and launch our upgraded network in less than 90 days.”
“Consumer demand for immediate online access to their favorite TV shows, music and movies is really changing the way that service providers, like United Communications, do busi-ness. A triple-play service offering is now a ‘must have’ value proposition in order to remain competitive in the market,” said Mitch Fleming, regional vice president of sales, ADTRAN Car-rier Networks Division. “Part of the challenge for service pro-viders is to offer these advanced services while utilizing existing infrastructure and maintaining legacy services with minimal customer impact. ADTRAN’s broadband access solutions al-low service providers maximum flexibility in deploying FTTH solutions across both copper and fiber as well as the scalability needed to accommodate network growth into the future.”
clearfield expands line of osp cabinets
Customers require higher-port count, pole-mounted solutions; platform reduces splicing costs without sacrificing quality or convenience
MINNEAPOLIS – Clearfield Inc., the specialist in fiber management and connectivity platforms for communications providers, announced an expanded offering for the FieldSmart Fiber Scalability Center (FSC) line of OSP cabinets. The FieldSmart FSC 432-Port Cabinet extends the scalability of the platform by providing up to 432 fiber ports in a pad-mount or pole-mount option. The FSC-432 joins the FSC-288, FSC-576 and FSC-1152 port solutions.
When deployed as PON cabinets, all these OSP cabinets utilize identical splitter modules, with sufficient fiber “legs” to reach any port on the cabinet. When deployed as cross-connect cabinets, they all provide a minimum of 48 user-defined feeder ports, allowing service providers custom configuration poten-tial for feeder-to-distribution ratios. “Flexibility is key,” com-ments Johnny Hill, chief operating officer for Clearfield. “Most every application environment is unique, and having the abil-ity to define feeder-to-distribution ratios on the fly has made the Clearfield OSP cabinet an important tool in reducing the cost of deploying broadband connectivity.”
“Before joining Clearfield, I was responsible for the out-side-plant design of an extensive FTTH build,” offers Brian Schrand, senior member of Clearfield’s technical staff. “Hav-ing deployed hundreds of these cabinets, I know that having an identical splitter in every cabinet – and every central of-
fice build – was a significant time and money saver. Stocking a single SKU for splitters reduced our inventory requirements.”
“Our goal is to ensure that our product lines are the most craft-friendly in the industry,” comments Cheri Beranek, presi-dent and CEO of Clearfield. “When I speak to executives of our telephone customers, they’ve commented that always hav-ing the right product on hand, without the huge cost or space requirements of a lot of inventory, keeps their plows running, their technicians building and their projects on schedule.”
cheetah splice on connector speeds Installation process
ORISKANY, NY – Fiber Instrument Sales Inc. (FIS), a lead-ing distributor and manufacturer of fiber optic products, has introduced the Cheetah Splice On Connector, the fastest way to install fiber optic connectors.
According to FIS President Frank Giotto, the Cheetah SOC is the quickest prepolished, factory-terminated pigtail to pre-pare, splice and install. The Cheetah SOC’s 27mm splice pro-tection sleeve is encapsulated and protected by the strain relief boot, eliminating the need for splice trays, chips and extra cabi-nets. “If you’re able to operate your fusion splicer, you will be able to install all of the connector types: ST, SC, FC and LC,” Giotto explains.
The Cheetah SOC, which meets industry standards for connector performance, enables easy installation because it is a preassembled, precleaved connector with few parts. It is de-signed for use on 900 um, 2mm and 3 mm fiber optic cable and is available in single-mode, multimode and 10 Gig OM3 and OM4. No special installation kit is required. There are two holder options: the universal SOC holder – a plastic molded holder that fits a variety of fusion splicers and works with ST, SC, FC and LC connector styles – and the metal SOC holder, which is precision-machined to be splicer specific, provides a secure fit and precise fiber alignment, and accommodates ad-ditional fusion splicers. FIS makes the Cheetah SOC available in a six-pack or bulk 100-pack. For more information on the Cheetah SOC and other products, visit www.fiberinstrument-sales.com or call 800-5000-FIS(347).
spot on standardizes on The Mesh Networks’ QuotaDefender system
HOUSTON – The Mesh Networks announced that Spot On Networks LLC, the nation’s largest provider of managed Wi-Fi services to the multifamily housing industry, has standardized on installing The Mesh Networks’ QuotaDefender System to its entire student-housing portfolio.
QuotaDefender is a traffic monitor and shaping bridge in-stalled in the LAN side of an existing management system. QuotaDefender has been shown to reduce the usage of Internet access pipes by up to 45 percent and increase oversubscription to between 30 and 50 to 1.
xFINITY Meets Demand For New Technology
Multifamily residents stand to benefit by new innovations.
PHILADEPHIA – The de-mand for new technology in the multifamily space has never been greater. Today’s
new residents are looking for properties or buildings that can support their needs in terms of connec-
tivity, information, en-tertainment and advance-
ment in new services. XFINITY satisfies those needs, thanks to Comcast’s network enhancement to an all-digital platform.
XFINITY seamlessly and creatively brings technology, in-novation and entertainment together, transforming the way multifamily residents use their home devices, access their fa-vorite movies and shows and stay connected to the things that
matter to them most.The new cloud-enabled X1 Platform on XFINITY is one
of the latest XFINITY services that brings innovation and en-tertainment together. It integrates customized interactive apps and social media features with traditional video services to cre-ate an entirely new television experience. Residents will get rich graphics with network logos and movie poster art, easy naviga-tion, simple search plus on-screen access to top social sites and apps such as Facebook, Twitter, traffic, sports and more. The X1 Platform was recently launched in Boston and will be avail-able to subscribers throughout the Comcast footprint over the course of 2012–13.
Another new feature for residents provides new ways for residents to stay connected to their XFINITY home phone services wherever they go. They can simply download the free XFINITY Connect app to their smartphones, iPads or iPod touches and get unlimited nationwide text messaging to anywhere in the U.S., Canada or Mexico by using their home phone numbers with XFINITY Voice.
At Comcast, we’re constantly reimagining the way multi-family residents and other customers interact with their TVs and other products both now and in the future. A fun, new feature that combines the XFINITY TV, Internet and Voice products is HD video calling with Skype on XFINITY, which provides residents the ability to communicate with family and
friends from the comfort of their couches with the lifelike qual-ity of TV. Using a keyboard on the back of a remote, a resident can even instant message with family and friends while watch-ing favorite shows. There’s no expensive equipment to purchase – the Skype on XFINITY package includes an HD video cam-era, a Skype adaptor box and a remote with a keyboard.
These new products and features are great examples of how Comcast is leveraging its all-digital network and the integra-tion of XFINITY products and services to deliver rich, person-al experiences for your residents across all screens at any time and anywhere. For more information on multifamily services from Comcast, visit xfinity.com/multifamily.
For more information on the new XFINITY products and features mentioned above, visit:
corning cable systems Introduces roc Dielectric Drop cables With Fastaccess Technology
FastAccess Technology reduces fiber access time by up to 55 percent when compared with traditional drop cables.
HICKORY, NC – Corning Cable Systems LLC, part of Corning Incor-
porated’s Telecommunica-tions segment, intro-
duces ROC Die lec t r ic
Drop Cables with FastAccess Technology. Ideal for fiber-to-the-home applications, the innovative FastAccess Technology design enables faster and easier removal of cable jackets. Opti-mized for field- and factory-termination processes, the compact design of ROC Dielectric Drop Cables with FastAccess Tech-nology allows for easier handling in the field, reduces slack stor-age requirements and improves transportation and storage costs.
Unlike some outdoor dielectric cables that require special tools for cable access, such as hook blades, the FastAccess Technology requires no special tools, thereby lowering costs. The dielectric feature of the cable also eliminates any bonding and grounding requirements.
ROC Dielectric Drop Cables with FastAccess Technology are backward compatible for easy connectorization or splicing and are available in preconnectorized assemblies.
For additional information on Corning Cable Systems products and services, contact a customer service representa-tive at 800-743-2675 toll free in the United States or 828-901-5000 international or visit the website at www.corning.com/cablesystems.
preformed line products Introduces The coYoTe oNe Dome closure
Segmented end plate simplifies fiber optic network connectivity.
CLEVELAND, OHIO – Preformed Line Products announced
the debut of its new COYOTE ONE Closure, which signifi-cantly enhances its comprehensive fiber optic closure lineup. This device brings together many connectivity solutions in a compact and cost-effective package.
The COYOTE ONE Closure uses a patented segmented end plate to provide independent access to every cable that enters the closure. Installation is quick, re-entry is simple us-ing common tools and no other cables are disrupted in the process.
• Compact size: 16” L x 10” W x 5.7” D (41 cm x 25 cm x 14 cm)
• Hinged collar system that allows for quick re-entry with no special tools required
• Tested in accordance with Telcordia GR-771-CORE• Direct buried, manhole, aerial or pole/wall mount• Ideal for FTTH deployment and backhaul networks
For more information on the COYOTE ONE Dome Closure or other PLP solutions, visit www.preformed.com/COYOTEO-NE, email [email protected] or call 440-461-5200.
Matrix Design Group selected To provide engineering services For WiredWest communications cooperative
EAST HANOVER, NJ – Matrix Design Group, a leading fiber optic engineering and design firm, announced that the WiredWest Communications Cooperative Corporation, a mu-nicipal communications cooperative consisting of over forty towns in Western Massachusetts, selected Matrix to provide engineering services for its planned fiber-to-the-home network. The project, which will bring high-speed Internet and telecom-munications services to an estimated 32,000 local residents and businesses, requires approximately 2,700 miles of network cable to be installed. The network will eventually connect to the state’s existing middle-mile fiber-optic infrastructure to create a future-proof, robust communications infrastructure for residents and businesses in WiredWest’s participating ter-ritory. Matrix Design Group has been awarded the contract to deliver high-level engineering and design services for layout of the fiber optic network. Matrix is also responsible for recom-mending network equipment, software, cables and field hard-ware, and for estimating construction and operating costs for the entire project. The high-level design and budget analysis is expected to be completed in early October 2012.
Through this partnership, Matrix Design Group and WiredWest will develop plans for a fiber optic infrastructure that will connect homes and businesses with an ultra-fast broadband network that can process large amounts of data. It will replace the decades-old telephone infrastructure that left western Massachusetts residents unable to access a network
capable of handling today’s bandwidth heavy applications. With this new fiber optic foundation, these communities will be positioned to sustain the exponential increase of broadband services that require an infrastructure capable of handling to-morrow’s growing demand.
Multicom Features end-to-end GpoN solution at the FTTH conference
ORLANDO, FL – Multicom is pleased to announce that it is featuring its new, end-to-end GPON solution at the FTTH Conference 2012. Multicom provides OLTs, in-door and outdoor ONTs and all other equipment needed for a GPON application, plus the experience and knowl-edge to put it all together. The advantages of Multicom’s GPON solution include:
• Profitable network effi-ciency – Affordably scalable from small MDUs to large develop-
ments
– Triple play maximizes revenue per customer, eliminat-ing churn
• Future-proof– Huge-bandwidth fiber up to 50 Tbps provides video,
voice and data capabilities all on one fiber– Flexible for deployments up to 20km (over 12 miles)
• Reduces operations costs and increases reliability– 80 percent reduction in power– Up to 70 percent reduction in capital costs– Immunity to corrosion, RFI, grounding, lightning– Eliminates the constant headaches of legacy systems
• GPON Optical Line Terminal (OLT):– About half the cost of the competition
• GPON Optical Network Terminal (ONT):– Can provide IPTV, RF and Wi-Fi all from the same
unit– State-of-the-art, open system– Interoperable with many closed-system OLTs and all
open-system OLTs
To learn more about how Multicom’s GPON solution can be an advantage for you, call Multicom at 800-423-2594 or email [email protected].
consumer demand for bandwidth-intensive data and video services will continue to drive fiber-to-
the-home deployment around the world well into the foreseeable future. De-signers of FTTH networks put much thought into choosing the right architec-ture for each job. However, the hardware used to implement the design is equally important.
Choosing the right drop cable inter-connect solution, for example, directly affects network reliability, operational flexibility and the economics of FTTH deployment. Failed connections can lead to costly service interruptions, so proven reliability ranks high on the list of “must haves” when a designer selects a connectivity solution. In addition, com-munications service providers strive to keep capital expenditures down so they can offer competitive rates. Therefore, the price tag of any hardware purchase (including the installation cost) is also a key consideration.
In determining the best solution for a particular FTTH deployment, a pro-vider must first decide between splices and connectors and then choose the best splice or connector for the particular circumstances of a deployment. This ar-ticle explores the available interconnect solutions for FTTH drop cables and discusses their advantages and disadvan-tages in the context of varying deploy-ment circumstances.
splIce or coNNecTor?Before deploying a FTTH network, a provider must first decide whether to use
splices, which are permanent joints, or connectors, which can be easily mated and unmated by hand. Decisions must be made for both the distribution point at one end of the drop cable and the opti-cal network terminal (ONT) or network interface device (NID) at the other. Both splices and connectors are widely used at distribution points. At the customer premises, connectors are almost always used because ONTs are commonly equipped with connector interfaces to facilitate plugging and unplugging for installation and testing. However, some ONT and NID solutions involve a com-bination of connector and splice.
splicesPros: Splices can provide excellent op-tical performance. Their reliability has been proven by many years of success-ful deployment in optical networks. Splicing eliminates the possibility of an interconnection point’s becoming dam-aged or dirty, which would potentially compromise signal integrity – as may
happen to a connector end face that is handled while unmated. Contaminants can cause high optical loss or even per-manently damage a connector end face.
Another advantage of splicing is that it enables a transition from 250µm drop cable fiber to jacketed cable.
Cons: The major drawback of splic-ing is its lack of operational flexibility. To reconfigure a drop at a distribution point (for example, when one subscriber cancels FTTH service and another one adds it) requires removing one splice, rearranging fibers and splicing two new fibers. This requires a technician to carry special splicing equipment for simple subscriber changes. In addition, the fiber-handling process may disrupt other customers’ service.
At distribution points, most cables contain 250µm fiber, which is easy to bend. Bending can cause high optical loss or even break the fiber. If a splice is used at an ONT, there must be space for a tray to hold and protect the splice.
Interconnect Solutions For FTTH Drop Cable Installations
By Jerry D. Jackson ■ 3M Communication Markets Division
Choosing the right interconnect solution for FTTH drop cables can have a great impact on a provider’s installation and operating costs.
Splices are permanent joints and more suitable for connections that will not be changed.
Connectors can easily be mated and unmated.
about the authorJerry D. Jackson is the fiber interconnect marketing manager for 3M Communica-tion Markets Division, a leader in communications technology. You can reach him at [email protected].
This increases the size and potentially the cost of an ONT.
Best for: Splices are most appropriate when drops are dedicated to particular living units and no future fiber rear-rangement will be necessary. This situ-ation is typically seen in new construc-tion, where a service provider can easily install all the drop cables during living-unit construction.
connectorsPros: Connectors provide greater net-work flexibility because they can be
mated and unmated repeatedly, allow-ing them to be reused over and over again. A technician can easily connect or disconnect subscribers without using any tools. A connector also provides an access point for network testing.
Cons: Materials cost is the most obvi-ous downside for connectors. They cost more than splices, although network rearrangement is much cheaper. Pro-viders must weigh the materials cost of connectors, along with their potential for contamination and damage, against their greater flexibility and lower net-work management expense.
Best for: Because connectors can be plugged and unplugged multiple times, they are most suitable for distribution points in areas where subscribers are likely to add and drop services. Con-nectors are used for ONTs because they have a connector interface. A connector pigtail and splice can be installed at an
ONT, or a connector can be field-termi-nated directly onto the drop cable.
cHoosING THe rIGHT splIceOnce a provider decides to use splicing, it must decide upon the type of splice. Splicing technologies for FTTH deploy-ment fall into two major categories: fu-sion and mechanical.
Fusion splicingFusion splicing is the de facto standard for fiber feeder and distribution net-works. Fusion splicers have also been considered to be a solution for FTTH drop splicing, especially because they provide high-quality splices with low insertion loss and reflection.
However, the initial capital expen-ditures, maintenance costs and slow installation speed of fusion splicing hin-der its status as the preferred solution. Chief among its drawbacks is the need to equip technicians with fusion splic-ing machines. Fusion splicers present a number of drawbacks:
• They cost thousands of dollars each, requiring a heavy investment to equip each technician in the field.
• They require specially trained tech-nicians to operate them.
• They require electrical power, usu-ally from batteries, which may lose charge in the field, adding time and cost to the process.
• They take time to set up and break down before and after installation, adding to labor cost. This can sig-nificantly impact installation time,
A typical mechanical fiber optic splice is de-signed to be installed in the field using simple hand tools.
Terminating fiber cable using a field-installed mechanical connector can be fast and easy.
especially because at many locations, including ONTs, only one splice is installed.
• They take time to warm up and heat the sleeves that protect the splice, further slowing installation.
From the standpoint of installation time, fusion splicing can make sense at distribution points, where many splices are performed at one time and instal-lation equipment is unpacked and re-packed only once. Fusion splicing is best suited, of course, for companies that have already invested in fusion splicing equipment and do not need to purchase additional splicing machines.
Mechanical splicingMechanical splices and connectors are successfully deployed in FTTH instal-lations around the world. According to FTTH Council statistics, 70 percent of global FTTH subscribers live in China, Japan and Korea. Those countries pri-marily use mechanical connectivity solutions.
Historically, mechanical splicing has not been popular in the United States,
because many providers share a concern that the index match-ing gel inside the splices can yellow or dry out, resulting in service failures. Over the last 20 years, the industry has made great strides in improving gel performance and longevity.
A typical mechanical fiber optic splice includes a small plas-tic housing with an aluminum alloy element to precisely align and clamp fibers. An index matching gel preinstalled at the fiber connection point maintains a low-loss optical interface, which results in an average insertion loss of less than 0.1dB.
Testing shows that the improved gel used in newer mechan-ical splices can perform well in temperatures from -40 to 167 degrees Fahrenheit. Global deployments of mechanical splices – millions are installed in indoor and outdoor locations – have shown that they can perform well in many environments.
cHoosING THe rIGHT coNNecTorA provider that chooses to use connectors must decide between factory-terminated and field-terminated products.
Factory-terminated connectorsFactory-terminated drop cables can provide high-performing, reliable connections. The controlled manufacturing process en-sures consistent fiber end-face geometry, which results in low optical loss. Factory termination also keeps labor costs low by reducing installation time.
An excellent application for a factory-terminated connector is a patch cord that connects a desktop ONT to a wall out-let box inside a living unit. Not infrequently, end users acci-dentally break these fibers. If this occurs, a patch cord with factory-terminated connectors can be easily replaced.
However, factory-terminated cables can be expensive com-pared with field-terminated alternatives. By nature, they are available only in predetermined lengths. Technicians must carry many different cable lengths to be sure they’ll have the
A spliceless, gel-free connector combines the performance of fusion splice-on connectors with the speed of mechanical splice connectors.
tecHNoLogyright length for a job. That can mean a hefty investment in inventory, especially for outdoor cables that have special, hardened fiber optic connectors. Because nearly all factory-terminated cables are longer than needed, they require cable management systems to store slack cable in a curbside cabinet or in a home.
Finally, if a connection goes bad, an entire patch cord must be replaced, not just a connector. This may be acceptable for indoor patch cords, but replacing outdoor drop cables can be expensive because of the cost of aerial or buried installation.
Field-terminated connectorsThe high costs associated with factory-terminated cable – inventory expense, the need for slack storage and the preter-minated cables themselves – have caused many providers to opt for field-termi-nated connectors, which allow techni-cians to customize installations by using a reel of cable and connectors.
Fuse-on connectors: Fuse-on connec-tors use the same technology as fusion splicing to provide the highest level of op-tical performance for a field-terminated connector. Incorporating a fusion splice inside a connector eliminates the need for a separate splice tray. However, fuse-on connectors share many of the same drawbacks as fusion splicing. They require expensive equipment, highly trained technicians, packing and un-packing time and a power source – all of which ratchet up installation costs.
Mechanical connectors: Mechani-cal connectors provide alternatives to fuse-on connectors for field installation of drop cables. Two configurations are
available: mechanical splice connectors and field-finished connectors without splice, gel or adhesive.
A mechanical splice connector is installed with a simple, handheld tool that does not require an electrical power source. Terminating fiber cable by us-ing these connectors is fast and easy and requires little training. A single-fiber termination can be completed in less than three minutes, greatly decreasing installation time compared with fusion splicing.
A spliceless, gel-free connector combines the performance of fusion splice-on connectors with the speed of mechanical splice connectors. The
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Hybrid connector solutions that are factory-terminated at the distribution point and field-terminated at the ONT are gaining popularity.
installation process is faster and less craft-sensitive than the common field-installation method of fusion splicing. Technicians can quickly and easily in-stall the connectors at a distribution point or a NID or ONT in five minutes or less, using only simple hand tools.
Hybrid connectorsDepending upon service provider re-quirements and living-unit configura-tion, a hybrid solution with a factory-terminated connector on one end of a drop cable and a field-terminated con-nector on the other end may be optimal. In this case, a technician plugs the fac-
tory-terminated end into a distribution terminal, trims the other end to length and installs a field connector. This en-ables custom installations that avoid slack cable storage and require installing only one connector in the field. This so-lution uses less labor than field installing both ends, but it does entail the extra cost of the scrap of cable cut off.
oNT solutionsONT and NID solutions deserve special consideration. Traditional solutions use either a factory-terminated fiber connec-tor, which does not require a splice, or a field-terminated solution that consists of
a pigtail connector and a splice. More recently, suppliers have in-
troduced field-terminated connectors that have internal splices and spliceless connectors that are hand-polished in the field using simple tools. This newer generation of connectors combines the ease of installation that makes factory-terminated connectors popular with the economy of field-terminated solutions.
coNclUsIoNThe drop cable interconnect solution is a key component of an FTTH network. Reliable broadband service depends upon robust connections at distribution points and at NIDs or ONTs. Choosing the right connectivity product can result in cost savings and efficient deployment and ensure reliable service to custom-ers. Globally, most FTTH drop cable installations have been and continue to be field-terminated on both ends of the cable with mechanical connectivity solutions. v
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The range of connectivity solutions for ONTs has expanded to include field-terminated connectors
with internal splices and spliceless connectors that are hand-polished in the field.
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The fiber-to-the-business market is growing rapidly as businesses exchange increasingly massive
volumes of data. Fiber drops to business premises – offices, banks, schools, mu-nicipal buildings, libraries, hotels and even cell towers – now constitute one of the largest revenue streams for service providers. Service providers compete for drop revenue based on timing (the ability to deliver fibers to a location in a timely manner), price (the lowest bid often wins) and connection quality.
Any deployment option that can re-duce costs, improve connection quality or permit faster deployment can make a service provider more competitive. One that can do all three covers all the bases.
TraDITIoNal passIVe FIber Drop DeploYMeNTToday, most deployment schemes require multiple splice points to drop fibers from backbone cables to commercial customers. As many as three splices can exist: Backbone fiber is spliced to distribution fiber at the manhole, distribution fiber is spliced to riser cable at the building entrance and riser cable is spliced to drop cable at the customer premises.
If splicing is outsourced to a contractor – which is the norm these days – this alternative can be expensive. It can also take two to three days to complete. Finally, optical loss and signal
about the authorLou Maiolo is president of CMS, a consulting firm in New York City, and is a consultant for ARIA Technologies. He has nearly 35 years’ experience in fiber connectivity and holds patents on fiber termination equipment and components. Prior to forming CMS, he held management positions with 3M, Automatic Connector, Amphenol and Porta Systems. You can reach him at [email protected].
Placing Fiber Drops To Commercial Customers
By Lou Maiolo ■ CMS
An innovative design eliminates splice points in commercial buildings, reducing deployment costs and improving capacity.
Table/Figure 1: A typical commercial deployment
standaRd method: splicing in the manhole, at the building entRance and at each
of fouR customeR pRemises
price each Quantity Total price
100 feet 48-fiber outside-plant cable to route to manhole @ $1.00/ft.
$100.00 1 $100.00
48-fiber splice enclosure at building entrance
$210.00 1 $210.00
12-fiber riser-rated OFNR cable, 400-foot runs @ $0.42/ft. (based on 400 feet average distance from floor to basement)
$168.00 4 $672.00
12-fiber combo patch and splice at each customer premises
tecHNoLogydegradation can occur at each of the three splice points between the back-bone cable and the customer premises.
Table 1 details the cost to drop fibers in an MTU to four customers in an of-fice building, using this traditional de-ployment method. In this case, 48 fibers enter the building and each customer gets 12.
preTerMINaTeD eNclosUres A much less splice-intensive deploy-ment scheme is to use a factory-preter-minated, compact drop cable enclosure, such as the FiberPatch from ARIA Technologies, at each cus-tomer premises with spools of indoor/outdoor fiber. A deployer can run fiber directly from an enclosure at a customer premises all the way to a manhole and splice it to backbone fiber there. No splicing needs to be done at the building entrance or at customer premises. Materials and labor costs are reduced by about half (in this example, by $6,398, as shown in Table 2), and the time for the entire installation is reduced from two or three days to half a day of contractor work.
A third option is to use the same kind of compact drop cable enclosure at each customer premises but to route the fiber to the building entrance, splice it to distribution cable there and splice again to backbone cable in a manhole. Using this method reduces splicing from three places to two places, saving $2,560 (as shown in Table 3) and, likely, a day of installation time. This alternative is less efficient than routing fiber all the way to a manhole, but it is appropriate when existing conduit is full and new conduits would be required. In this situation, an enclosure with interlocking armored plenum cable (sometimes called cable-in-conduit) is an excellent solution. This type of deployment is suitable for multitenant office buildings, hotels and other high-rise buildings.
MoUNTING opTIoNsBecause of its small size, a compact drop cable enclosure can
be useful in many other applications. For example, outside-plant cabinets often do not have enough rack space available
for mounting passive fiber drop enclo-sures, but they can usually fit small, wall-mounted enclosures. Cell tower backhaul drops and intelligent traffic system cabinets used by transportation departments can also benefit from com-pact enclosures.
A major MSO in Florida deployed the ARIA FiberPatch preterminated drop cable solution in a hospitality ap-plication for drops to users in business offices. In this case, 12-fiber SC/APC-terminated FiberPatch drop cable en-closures with OFNR indoor-rated cable were mounted under desks for easy access to the TX/RX equipment. The front faceplates with bulkhead adapters
compact dRop enclosuRe method: splicing only in the manhole
price each Quantity Total price
12-fiber FiberPatch enclosure with 500-foot run of indoor/outdoor cable (based on 400 feet average distance from floor to basement plus 100 feet to manhole)
$716.00 4 $2,864.00
Contract labor for splicing $75.00 48 $3,600.00
ToTal cosT: $6,464.00
Table/Figure 2: Deployment using compact drop enclosures
A compact drop enclosure can save space in an outside-plant cabinet.
tecHNoLogywere oriented toward the users, allowing them to be patched to equipment on the desks. The pigtail cable that exited the rear of the enclosures was routed down the wall, into conduit and over to the telecom closet, where it was spliced to backbone cables that traveled up the building riser.
Often, customers change their in-stallations from wall-mounted to rack-mounted or vice versa. With a typical enclosure, an installer must return to the warehouse to swap out the enclosure and return a day later to complete the install. This costs time and money. An enclosure that offers a choice of installa-tion methods gives installers much more flexibility.
Front faceplate with bulkhead adapters is oriented toward the user, allowing for patching to equipment on the desk.
Under-desk deployment: Pigtail cable is routed down a wall.
hybRid method: splicing in manhole and at the building entRance
price each Quantity Total price
100 feet 48-fiber outside-plant cable to route to manhole @ $1.00/ft. $100.00 1 $100.00
48-fiber splice enclosure at building entrance $210.00 1 $210.00
12-fiber FiberPatch enclosure with 400-foot run of indoor/outdoor cable (based on 400 feet average distance from floor to basement) $698.00 4 $2,792.00
Contract labor for splicing $75.00 96 $7,200.00
ToTal cosT $10,302.00
Table/Figure 3: Deployment using compact drop enclosures routed to the building entrance
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plied standard with wall-mount brack-ets installed. These brackets are easily removed on site to enable the FiberPatch to be rack-mounted either in an empty rack-mount enclosure or in a “three-patch” rack-mount faceplate. A contrac-
tor can be dispatched with the FiberPatch and the faceplate, equipped for either wall- or rack-mount installation.
Where and when does it make sense to deploy a pretermi-nated compact enclosure? This type of solution makes sense for any service provider looking to expedite customer installa-tions in apartment complexes, office buildings or office parks. The reduction in the number of splice points makes FiberPatch or similar solutions very economical. A major MSO is even deploying FiberPatch for video and audio drops at the Repub-lican National Convention this summer.
However, these solutions are designed for smaller drops of up to 24 fibers. Higher-density applications, such as central of-fices or headends, are better served using traditional combina-tion patch-and-splice enclosures.
In summary, saving time and money are key to capturing commercial customer business. By reducing splicing and con-tractor time and labor, service providers can better compete in the fiber drop to commercial customer market. vFiberPatch spooled and ready for deployment
Preterminated compact enclosures make sense for smaller drops of up to 24 fibers. Higher-
density applications should use patch and splice.
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once upon a time, edge-of-net-work devices – also known as telephones – belonged to tele-
phone companies, and life was simple. In 1968, the FCC opened up telephone networks to user-owned devices, paving the way for a new era of faxes, modems, answering machines and high-tech phones. Life was still simple, at least for phone companies, because subscribers were responsible for their own devices.
Today, with broadband services pro-liferating, providers are placing many pieces of equipment at customer prem-ises. A telephone company that may once have supplied only a DSL modem to a customer may now also install a broadband router, IPTV set-top boxes, a DVR, a femtocell and more. The costs of installing, configuring, activating and troubleshooting all this equipment can be substantial.
In addition, subscribers install mul-tiple devices of their own on home networks – and most don’t have the technical knowhow to configure or troubleshoot them. When problems occur, they often assume the service doesn’t work and call their providers. Service providers that want to satisfy their subscribers often spend a great deal of time and money fixing problems that originate with user equipment.
Tr-069 To THe rescUeTo enable phone companies to manage customer-premises equipment re-motely, the DSL Forum (now called the Broadband Forum) published a techni-cal specification for the TR-069 CPE
Reaching Into The Home NetworkWith the maturing of TR-069 technology, service providers can support subscribers’ home networks easily and inexpensively. Service providers can offer better customer service for lower cost – and tap new revenue streams.
WAN Management Protocol, generally referred to as TR-069. The specifica-tion, first published in 2004, has been enhanced and amended several times. In the last several years, electronics ven-dors have built support for it into most new connected-home products, includ-ing residential gateways, set-top boxes, femtocells, IP phones, network-attached storage, home automation devices and a host of other “smart” devices.
The research and analysis firm Ovum recently estimated that, at the end of 2011, more than 147 million TR-069–enabled devices were in use world-wide – mainly residential gateways but other devices as well – and the number was growing fast. As home equipment goes through the natural cycle of obso-lescence and replacement, the propor-tion that is TR-069–enabled should rise dramatically.
Though TR-069 was originally de-signed for traditional telephone net-works, operators of FTTH, cable and
wireless networks now use it as well. The standard is medium-agnostic and can operate over any IP-based network.
Cable’s adoption of TR-069 is fairly new. As Chris Busch, chief techni-cal officer for Incognito Software, ex-plains, cable operators initially relied on DOCSIS for provisioning devices, but “DOCSIS doesn’t have the ability to … reach into the customer premises. That’s the next holy grail. As operators move more into IP-based services, what’s in-side the premises becomes imperative.” For example, Busch says, if a customer needs help making a TV Everywhere service work on an iPad, “With DOC-SIS, all a customer service rep could say is ‘Your modem looks fine.’ When you add TR-069, you’re giving the customer service rep the tools to interrogate what’s going on in the home network.”
THIrD-parTY TesTING In addition to sheer numbers, there are other signs that TR-069 has reached
The Broadband Forum’s TR-069 protocol enables service providers to remotely provision, diagnose and troubleshoot equipment on home networks.
By Masha Zager ■ Broadband Communities
about the authorMasha Zager is the editor of BroadBand Communities. You can reach her at [email protected].
maturity as an industry standard. One is that the Broadband Forum, which is the keeper of the standard, recently designated the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL), a premier third-party testing lab, as the official laboratory for all Broadband Forum TR-069 testing.
Erica Johnson, the director of UNH-IOL, says the lab is “envisioning a world when every device manufactured for the home can easily be brought online and managed remotely by the resident or provider as needed. In the future, these devices may support home energy management, climate control or se-curity systems, but today the focus is on devices that facilitate telecommuting and home entertainment.”
Conformance and interoperability testing by UNH-IOL and certification by the Broadband Forum are expected to help service providers select devices for customer premises. They will also reduce the time providers spend testing devices in their own labs and ease the burden on manufacturers as well. Robin Mersh, CEO of the Broadband Forum, says, “If you’re the service provider, your choices are to go to the expense and time of testing devices for TR-069 compliance. If you’re a ven-dor, you have to justify your claims of compliance. This is an effective way of answering both of those issues.”
NeTWork MaNaGeMeNT solUTIoNs Yet another sign of maturity is the increasing number of soft-ware products that incorporate TR-069 to help service provid-ers provision and manage end-user services. Two recently intro-duced products are Incognito Software’s Auto Configuration Service 2.0 and Calix’s Consumer Connect.
Auto Configuration Service 2.0 enables zero-touch provi-sioning to support services such as Wi-Fi management, paren-tal controls, VoIP, storage, IPTV and more. The software can automatically discover new types of vendor devices on a net-work and create device models for them on the fly.
Calix’s new TR-069 –based auto-provisioning product, Consumer Connect, also performs dynamic device discovery.
Both products complement pre-existing bandwidth analysis tools. Auto Configuration Service 2.0 complements the com-pany’s Bandwidth Activity Reporter, which helps providers monitor subscribers’ bandwidth usage nonintrusively, evalu-ate adherence to service-level agreements, develop new services and billing options and plan the growth of network capacity. Consumer Connect complements Calix’s Flow Analyze, which perfoms similar functions to Incognito’s Bandwidth Activity Reporter.
Geoff Burke, senior director of corporate marketing for Ca-lix, explains that Flow Analyze and Consumer Connect provide a common ID that allows analysis across the entire access net-work. He says, “If you have an issue, you can start from Layer 1 and reach all the way to the set-top box or other consumer device and have visibility into everything. If you combine that with Flow Analyze, you can track all the way back to the data center and beyond. It gives you a large and comprehensive view of what’s going on in the network.”
Consumer Connect, along with Flow Analyze, is cloud-based, which enables affordable pricing for small service provid-
ers – there are no up-front hardware costs – and allows provid-ers to add subscribers without having to upgrade their systems. The software scales easily to support millions of subscribers.
Burke says that by enabling remote device management, Consumer Connect not only makes customer service reps more efficient but also gives service providers a “very powerful tool” to enter the home IT space. “Service providers have lost revenue streams from line erosion and new regulations, and they need new frontiers to drive new opportunities for revenues,” he says. “Taking over home networking is one of these opportunities.”
Some service providers now charge $5 to $10 per month to maintain and provision subscribers’ home wireless networks. Instead of following the original Geek Squad model, which in-volved sending agents to subscribers’ homes, they can perform most operations remotely with TR-069 capabilities.
Burke adds, “As service providers transition from voice to broadband, there’s also a clear shift in where the end of the network is. It used to be that … for regulatory or logistical reasons, service providers wanted the termination point to be outside the home. New technology such as TR-069 and the empowering of subscribers has really drawn the access network into the home – it ends at the device.
“It creates a challenge. If you do it incorrectly, you’re rolling more trucks. If you do it correctly, you’re finding new oppor-tunities for revenue and customer satisfaction and a whole new business model.” v
Is this the best of times or the worst of times for video service providers? Record high content costs, vigorous competition from traditional and over-the-
top video providers and wildly increased subscriber expectations certainly pose challenges. On the bright side, providers can take advantage of new technologies to engage their customers in new ways.
Should operatorS offer ott ServiceS?Pay-TV margins are slim enough that some small telcos, such as Toledo Tele-phone in Washington state, are abandon-ing their IPTV offerings for Roku-based over-the-top (OTT) services. Others – even large telcos such as Windstream – are pursuing similar OTT strategies rather than ever launching IPTV at all. (Windstream also resells satellite TV.) Subscribers to these operator-offered OTT services may get better prices than those dealing directly with OTT com-panies, and operators may increase reve-nues for their Internet services by bump-ing subscribers to higher data tiers.
However, according to David Thompson, product marketing director of equipment vendor ZyXEL, telcos’ de-fection to OTT is not widespread and is not likely to be. IPTV technology costs have declined; among other innova-tions, Microsoft’s small-scale version of its Mediaroom IPTV product reduces the burden of offering a traditional pay-TV service. In addition, Thompson says, “It’s difficult for service providers to monetize OTT video, other than what they get for the Internet service they’re already being paid for. No one’s figured it out.”
Another option for service providers is
to offer a combination of traditional pay TV and OTT services such as Google TV envisioned. However, this option has been slow to take off in the United States. (As an FTTH service provider, Google now offers an Internet-enabled set-top box, but OTT video does not appear to be part of its service.)
Vikram Shrivastava, marketing di-rector for chip maker Sigma Designs, says several Latin American operators are ordering hybrid boxes with support for HTML5 and other streaming video technologies and are beginning to of-fer hybrid services, but “we haven’t seen hybrid boxes in North America because the content relationships in the United States are very strict. … It’s very diffi-cult, given the carriage rules.” Shrivas-tava says hybrid boxes that combine In-ternet video with tuners for off-the-air broadcast channels may begin to show up in U.S. retail stores.
Shrivastava does see a role for an-other type of hybrid set-top box, how-ever – one that controls both home au-tomation and video. Sigma introduced a combination IPTV/Z-wave box last year and is beginning to see traction for it as video service providers look to home au-tomation as a new revenue stream.
Where iS tv everyWhere?For the last several years, pay-TV pro-viders have identified TV Everywhere, or multiscreen services, as their primary response to the growth of online con-tent. The TV Everywhere strategy as-sumes that customers will be more likely to retain pay-TV subscriptions if those subscriptions entitle them to watch video on demand on their computers and mobile devices.
Implementation of TV Everywhere hasn’t been smooth or easy, and in July, media analyst Rich Greenfield of BTIG Research caused an industrywide ker-fuffle by calling the strategy a “complete and utter failure.”
Jonathan Weitz, partner, and David Helfrick, principal of Interactive Broad-band Consulting Group (IBB), believe Greenfield overstated the case. “There’s a lot of content available now on a lot of devices,” Helfrick says. “There’s a lot of activity and motivation. Someone may say it’s a failure because the original goal was to make every piece of content avail-able on every device in a similar way across operators and devices.
“That hasn’t happened. Some pro-grammers make their content available for free, and others require users to have
The New World of VideoNew strategies, new services, new devices and new network technologies are keeping the industry hopping.
about the authorMasha Zager is the editor of BroadBand Communities. You can reach her at [email protected].
By Masha Zager ■ Broadband Communities
Is TV Everywhere a “complete and utter failure”? That depends on the definition of “failure.”
a cable subscription. Others are saying they won’t make it available at all. If you were saying that everyone had to do it the same way, then it’s a failure. But there is content everywhere.” The avail-ability of content on multiple devices, he says, makes pay-TV services more valu-able to subscribers.
He adds, “IBB’s point of view is that TV Everywhere has the potential to grow to a meaningful percentage of TV consumption over the next three years. We believe that content rights, the cur-rency of cloud platform measurement and technical things like authentica-tion will be addressed – and as they’re addressed, there will be more content available, more marketing dollars spent on promoting it and more consumer awareness and acceptance. Look at video on demand and DVR usage – TV Everywhere could eventually grow to be in that neighborhood.”
Certainly TV Everywhere meets a perceived need – as ZyXEL’s Thompson says, “People don’t just want to watch TV anymore; they’re taking the tablet out onto the deck.” ZyXEL uses DLNA technology to reduce the cost of moving content around from device to device.
However, even if TV Everywhere’s start-up problems shake out and even if consumers come to accept and value the service, its role in retaining video cus-tomers is still doubtful. Some observ-ers think TV Everywhere is not really needed to keep pay-TV customers from “cutting the cord.”
“Rumors of cord-cutting are greatly overstated,” says Jim Guillet, head of video and content delivery marketing for equipment vendor Alcatel-Lucent. A Canadian who is devoted to his hockey team, Guillet emphasizes the role of live sports programming in keeping viewers attached to their pay-TV providers.
Stuart Thomson, senior director of consumer electronics for chip maker Broadcom, agrees, saying that though pay-TV providers may lose video-on-de-mand revenue to online movie services, they won’t lose subscribers until live TV is available over the top, all the time. “The Olympics [streamed online] is big right now – but it has to be 24/7, not just something special,” he says.
Thomson believes providers can make up lost VoD revenue by shifting customers to higher broadband service tiers. “Broadband is highly valuable to the consumer and the supplier,” he says. “The supplier can increase its return by [charging for] either better quality of service or higher throughput.”
tv everyWhere, everyWhereA significant limitation of TV Every-where is that, in most cases, “every-where” means “everywhere in the house and backyard.” Some content is avail-able for subscribers on the go, but often, a subscriber who wants to watch cable VoD on a laptop in a hotel room is out of luck. Starting a movie on the home TV and continuing it seamlessly using a laptop on the road is an even more dis-tant dream.
ZyXEL’s Thompson points out that, to watch pay-TV content on the road, a subscriber generally must store that content in a home-based DVR and then push it via the Internet to the remote de-vice. “If you push content upstream from the home as a Sling does, that’s fine,” Thompson says, noting that Sling tech-nology is now being built into many set-top boxes. “But you need the bandwidth. That’s why we’re seeing a lot more interest from providers looking at technologies that will give more upstream bandwidth – VDSL with bonding, DOCSIS 3.1 or fiber to the home.”
Some industry observers believe new video compression technologies may help realize the promise of TV Everywhere without investment in network upgrades. For example, Broadcom’s Thomson cites High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), a draft standard that promises to reduce bandwidth needs by 50 percent and offer a “migration path to supporting multi-screen services without necessarily re-quiring more bandwidth to customers.”
On the other hand, Thomson points out, service providers may use new
video compression technologies to sup-port video with higher resolution – true high-definition TV or the even higher 4K x 2K standard that several new TV models now support.
Thomson says retailers are reporting that, even though 3D has not yet proven to be a “game changer” for video, “they think that with 4K x 2K, consumers can see a fundamental difference. … Con-sumers won’t all be willing to pay the premium price, but at least the selling of the idea is done by the technology itself.”
He adds, “Operators will use 4K x 2K as a differentiating feature, just as they all were in a rush to say how many high-definition channels they had.”
If, in a few years, 4K x 2K televisions are priced for the mass market and be-come the standard offering, then any breathing room afforded by HEVC will disappear, and operators will still need to upgrade their upstream bandwidth to realize the potential of multiscreen solutions.
the NeW remoteBeyond adding one more screen to mul-tiscreen, tablet computers offer many new opportunities for service providers. One obvious opportunity is to improve video search and navigation, which the proliferation of cable channels and on-demand programs has made increas-ingly challenging. When consumers see how much easier navigating Web-based services is, they express frustration with the traditional TV approach.
Broadcom’s Thomson comments, “There’s a better way to discover what’s on and to move through menus and displays. That navigation might as well take place on a companion device such as a tablet, as opposed to a cumbersome remote.” Google’s FTTH service uses a Nexus 7 tablet in place of a remote, and other providers, including Verizon, are reported to be considering this approach.
If taking video on the road requires streaming it from a home DVR, FTTH is a big plus.
Guillet believes that tablet comput-ers, which have ample processing power, will eventually replace not only remote controls but also set-top boxes. “Things the set-top box did can be done on the iPad, which the consumer willingly spends money on,” he says. “Removing the set-top box is the cable companies’ vision, three or five or eight years out.” The natural replacement cycle for tele-visions, which is filling the marketplace with “smart” TVs, will also contribute to the demise of the set-top box, Guil-let says.
Not everyone shares this expecta-tion, however. For example, ZyXEL’s Thompson notes that “the iPad is more of a terminal – it’s got processing capa-bility but no storage or [fast] network connection.” Because DVR functional-ity is now a critical part of set-top boxes, Thompson says, an iPad would be an inadequate substitute.
the compaNioN Tablets are more than newfangled re-motes and set-top boxes; they are great devices for communicating, and they have made TV watching more social than ever before. Because tablets are small and convenient, many viewers use them while they’re watching TV to dis-cuss shows with far-flung friends, family and fellow enthusiasts.
Show producers set up Twitter hashtags or ask their stars to tweet, but in general, social TV is a user-driven phenomenon whose sudden rise took the industry somewhat by surprise. Ser-vice providers still benefit from it be-cause social TV helps reverse the tide of tape-it-now-and-watch-it-later behavior.
Guillet says, “One thing about this idea of watching live and participat-ing in real-time conversations is that it drives live viewing behavior, so viewers see the ads.” As he points out, the high-est advertising fees are commanded by contests, sports events and reality shows, all of which “draw you toward watch-ing them live and seeing the ads.” The more willing viewers are to watch ads, the more valuable video services are.
In addition to encouraging subscrib-ers’ natural propensity to chat, content providers also develop applications for
tablets and other mobile devices. “Vot-ing and polling on a show about what’s going on or about the characters is a simple yet compelling use case,” says Helfrick. “Another one is companion content, where in real time, you get ad-ditional text or pictures or video related to what you’re seeing. It allows you to dig deeper and get more information. That kind of use case is to ‘superserve your super fans.’” Along with social TV, these kinds of applications inspire super fans to promote viewership of a show.
A good example is the new UFC.TV app that the Ultimate Fighting Champi-onship and NeuLion recently launched for the iPhone and iPod touch. Users can order and watch live pay-per-view events, see archived fights, gain access to fight cards and other information, view additional camera angles, chat with other fans and purchase items from the store. NeuLion’s executive vice president, Chris Wagner, says, “More than just video, the level of interaction and accessibility within the app truly changes the way fans consume sports content and enhances the relationship between the UFC and … fans.”
According to Helfrick, second-screen experiences not only make consum-ers more interested in shows and more likely to tune in again but also drive increased recall for ads. Cross-platform advertising may be the greatest value of the second screen for providers. Helfrick says, “Clearly a lot of viewers are already spending time looking at things online while they’re watching TV. … There’s a lot of value in the attention of the viewer, so there’s a lot of value to un-lock when the industry can bring that attention back to the program and to 30-second spots through rich, interac-tive experiences. They should be able to offer advertisers cross-platform ads with the ability to interact directly with con-sumers and the metrics they have come to expect from online advertising.”
NeW NetWorkS for videoUpgrading networks to support higher upstream bandwidth isn’t all that pro-viders are doing to accommodate the onslaught of video. Among other no-table trends,
• Cable companies are beginning to migrate to IPTV to support the next-generation user interfaces that subscribers demand, to reduce the cost of delivering video (Helfrick says that with IPTV, “Customer-premises equipment can be cheaper or nonexistent”) and to free up band-width. However, the migration is somewhat slower than many observ-ers anticipated.
• Because IPTV won’t free up band-width until all subscribers are con-verted and non-IP channels can be turned off, cable companies are also using switched digital video as a tran-sitional strategy. This provides room to start simulcasting in IP. Some are also migrating video-on-demand content to MPEG-4 format where possible because its higher compres-sion level reduces bandwidth needs.
• Video providers are replacing super headends with content distribution networks so they can cache content closer to viewers. “If you’re deliver-ing high-definition video by unicast, it’s the only way to scale to any level,” Guillet says, noting that the trend started with video on demand but will eventually encompass live TV as well. Storing content at the edge will help pay-TV providers compete with OTT providers by delivering better-quality pictures. Though OTT pro-viders use third-party content dis-tribution networks such as Akamai, their video content is typically not cached or prioritized.
• Video service platforms are migrat-ing to the cloud, enabling service providers to take advantage of open-standard products and become more agile and innovative. “If you embrace the software technology that Twitter uses, that makes it easier to integrate with Twitter,” Guillet says.
Whether good or bad, the times are nothing if not interesting. To give Guillet the last word: “It’s always fun in the tran-sition. There are new ideas and lots of in-novation, and changes can take place.” v
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