Prospects Brighten for Fiber to the Home

As broadband users debate the benefits of DSL versus cable modems, there's slow but steady growth in fiber optic cabling that goes the last mile, bringing almost unlimited bandwidth to homes and businesses. Fiber has been considered too expensive for individual homes and small businesses, but component makers are dropping prices to open up the market.

The benefits will be significant. While next generation DSL offerings will lift peak speeds to around 6 Mbits/second, fiber optics offer speeds in the hundreds of Mbits/second. That's enough bandwidth that fiber providers talk about providing the "triple play" of phone, TV, and Internet over the fiber link without multiple providers.

The Fiber to the Home (FTTH) Council in Corning, NY (www.ftthcouncil.org) says as of June, 80 communities offered FTTH, up from 50 a year ago. "The number of homes has seen greater than a 300% growth rate even in this economy," says Michael Render of Render, Vanderslice, and Associates, a market research company based in Tulsa, OK.

Telecom providers who have resisted the changeover are now taking steps to bring fiber optics to the home. "In May, Bellsouth, Verizon, and SBC put out a request for proposal for FTTH, which marked a significant change from just three months earlier," says James Lemberg, president of Solution Advisors, a Newton, NC, consulting company (www.solution-advisors.com). Standards are among the infrastructure technologies that are moving forward quickly, leveraging Ethernet to provide a common architecture for delivering data. The IEEE 802.3ah Task Force and the Ethernet in the First Mile Alliance recently made "real world deployment demonstrations." That sets the stage for actual commercial deployment of Ethernet to the home.

A key reason for all this activity is that fiber is getting cheaper. "Two years ago, the cost per foot was around $38-$40 to deploy fiber to the home. Today that's more like $1-$3 per foot," he adds.

Some cost cutting comes from the advance of construction techniques and installation tools. But a large portion of the cost cutting has been done by subsystem and component suppliers. "The cost of an optical transceiver has fallen 80% in the last four years," says John Kenny, chief scientist at Wave7Optics, a system integrator and maker of passive optical network equipment (www.wave7optics.com).

Another example, Omron Electronics LLC of Schaumburg, IL (www.omron.com) is preparing to unveil FTTH lighting components that use its Micro Lens Array technology, which has seen widespread use in backlights for cell phones.

The part will largely eliminate the alignment now required for LEDs and other light sources. "We use plastic to compete with traditional glass technologies, which are expensive. Another advantage is that glass is mostly spherical, but we can play with things in plastic and do different shapes, even bending the light," says Steve Massie, advanced technology manager at Omron's Electronic and Mechanical Controls Division.