Fiber to the Home or Financed to the Hilt?

June, 2003

Fiber to the Home or Financed to the Hilt?

Ok, I stole the above title from an overhead from the Martin Group's Dustin Maier and his presentation at NTCA's “Fiber: Opticmize Your Network.” Several readers of last month's Viodi View seemed to agree with the “Financed to the Hilt” phrase and suggested that the time for Fiber to the Home still is not here.

I definitely can see their point as, like with so many “new” technologies, it has been touted for so long, it is difficult to believe it could finally be here. One of the main points that Maier made was that Fiber to the Home can work today. He pointed out, however, that FTTH definitely needs a “triple play of voice, data and video” to prove-in the economics. Even with those applications, it still may not work in all deployments.

But the fact that it does work in some deployments was evidenced by the diverse group of operators that spoke of their success. Bill Hotchkiss, General Manager of Huxley Communications (a 3,000 subscriber Iowa Telco), put it best when he said,

“I hope we never bury another foot of copper in Huxley or anyplace else. We do Fiber to the Home to all of the new areas. If we need to replace copper, we intend to replace it with fiber. And we are kind of doing things backward right now, most companies tend to build towns first.”

As is probably obvious, I really enjoyed this conference and the chance to produce the CD for NTCA. The CD is packed with over 9 hours of conference audio that is synchronized to the presentations. In fact, I am listening to it right now. This CD is a great way to hear directly from the speakers, instead of relying on my reporting. To purchase this CD, please Click Here

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