RBOCs Outline Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) Plans

"Deep fiber deployments offer the only future proof architecture," said Peter Hill, VP Technology Planning & Deployment at BellSouth, speaking at USTA Telecom 03. Three key advantages are a longer planned service life with less ongoing maintenance, potential regulatory advantages over the existing copper plant, and a rapidly narrowing cost differential compared with copper. Hill said the joint RFP for FTTP issued by BellSouth, Verizon and SBC provides the market leverage to really stimulate the industry. BellSouth has been pursuing a fiber-to-the-curb (FTTC) architecture since 1995 and plans to continue with that strategy. Nearly one million homes have been fiber-passed out of a market of 14 million homes in BellSouth territory. BellSouth will soon begin testing FTTP and plans field trials in the second half of 2004. Greenfield deployments would be the most likely applications for FTTP.


"Fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) has been under development for at least 20 years," said Keith Cambron, President & CEO of SBC Laboratories. Cambron said the FSAN (ITU G.983) standard was selected for the joint RFP because it is a well-defined specification, it is available today, and is not a data-only solution -- meaning that it supports POTS and a flexible video delivery strategy. The key enabling technologies for widespread FTTP, said Cambron, are WDM and the decline in optical transceiver prices. Significantly, the 3 wavelength architecture enables the carrier to deliver an RF over video service and/or IPTV. Because the PON architecture serves a maximum of 32 homes on a node, Cambron believes the RF overlay architecture will provide a strategic VOD advantage over cable operators, who typically serve over 1,000 homes per fiber fed HFC node. The joint RFP specifically did not address several key components of an FTTP deployment. For instance, it did not specify what the home multimedia network should look like; it did not ask for bids on the actual fiber or splitters needed for the outside plant; and it did not cover the video headend or set-top boxes needed to deliver a complete service. Cambron said SBC is still studying the business case for FTTP. The company is currently working on letters of agreement with suppliers and lab testing and market trials will follow. Possible greenfield deployments could occur at SBC in the latter half of 2004, depending on regulatory and market conditions.


"FTTH has long been described as about two years away," said Mark Wegleitner, Senior VP and CTO for Verizon Communications. Now that is about to change at Verizon. Several important lessons were learned from the joint RFP, which included a request for forward-pricing based on a five year forecast whereby between 2 million and 8 million customer locations would be reached. The first lesson, said Wegleitner, is that the vendor community is fully engaged on this project and that deployable solutions currently exist. The second lesson is that no perfect solution has emerged. Work is especially needed in three areas: operational support and integration with the carrier's existing OSS; better solutions for powering the ONTs at the customer premise; and developing a better RF adaptor for upstreaming signaling from a settop box. Subsequent RFPs in these areas have been issued. Wegleitner also said that to make FTTP a success, it is important to make an overlay network to be as variable-cost as possible. In other words, Verizon would like to defer up to 50% of the cost until a customer actually signs up for the service. Verizon is currently planning an aggressive rollout schedule whereby 500,000 to one million homes would be passed in an overlay network in the first year. FTTP is seen as a market necessity. Wegleitner believes that if Verizon is still deploying copper in five years, "we'll be in a great deal of competitive trouble."