Bring it on Home
(As featured in the September/October Issue of LastMILE Magazine)
By Mark Boxer

With Prices Down, FTTH Is on the Rise

A quiet revolution is occurring in unlikely places around the country. Residential customers are demanding higher-level services, many of which can only be provided by the bandwidth available from fiber. As more services become IP-based and the pricing of products and services continues to drop, new service providers are finding that there is a business case for bringing the high bandwidth, low maintenance and high reliability of fiber to customers. In some cases, service providers can provide the triple or quadruple play (voice, data, video and security monitoring services) to groups of homeowners as small as 100 subscribers.

These service providers range from incumbent telco or cable carriers to facilities-based Internet Service Providers to separate companies set up explicitly for the purpose of providing quadruple-play services to specific residential developments. In many cases, the various entities above combine to form various types of partnerships.

The growth of this market is truly explosive, and contributing to the dramatic increase in FTTH projects around the nation. Part of the reason for this growth is that the solution is easy and uses technology proven over several years — first in Asia, and now around the world. Finally, the scale of the prior deployments is driving down the cost of the electronics to the point that it is viable for even small deployments.

There are several keys to making this model work. First and foremost is having a system with low video headend costs and reasonably priced video programming packages. Since headends have traditionally cost upward of $1 million, technology that minimizes these headend costs are absolutely critical to enabling triple play for smaller numbers of subscribers. There are several content sources that fit the bill, but a key component to minimizing the costs is the ability to transmit cable TV signals up to 3.5 GHz, enabling the use of “L” band video content. These sources have been used for years by Private Cable Operators (PCOs) in multiple dwelling units (MDUs). Use of this technology over a fiber infrastructure is relatively new, but not overwhelmingly challenging from a technical standpoint.

Additional keys are reasonably priced backhaul services to enable VoIP, and low cost optical components and plant to deliver the services. Over the past several years, prices for fiber and electronic components have dropped to the point that a typical FTTH installation in a residential development — including labor, headend materials, plant materials and in-home equipment — can run less than $2,000 per subscriber. In addition to the video components described above, the use of Ethernet Point-to-Point end electronics provide symmetric 100 Mb/second connectivity at price points that are 20 to 30 percent of conventional PON equipment prices.

The final key to making FTTH a reality for a non-traditional provider is a high subscriber take rate. Although this sounds like mom and apple pie, some early and high profile FTTH deployments suffered from high costs and low subscription rates, resulting in financial problems. Subscription rates of greater than 70 percent, with an average price of $120, can result with consumers getting a nice bargain relative to existing providers, and can also provide a reasonable return on the investment.

AFL Telecommunications’ program, FTTH Made Easy, assists the potential service provider by evaluating various available technologies, including E-PON, G-PON and Ethernet Point-to-Point equipment. In addition to evaluating the technical merits of various options, the program assists customers by providing a full high-level look at the business case to help predict Return on Investment (ROI). Finally, the program helps to identify appropriate partners to provide various services, from content provision to legal support, to ensure that the project is a success.

Ellicott City, Md.
Ellicott City, Md., is a small hamlet located southwest of Baltimore. It’s best known as a perennial member of Money Magazine’s “Best Places to Live” club. Quality of life is high, with small-town living in the shadow of the Baltimore and Washington, D.C. metroplex. The area is home to a highly educated, technology-savvy workforce. These people are typically up to speed with the latest technology trends and appreciate the bandwidth and future-proofing capabilities that fiber brings.

Ellicott City is also now known for another Quality of Life amenity. The Ellicott City Cable Co. (ECC) has brought FTTH technology for all of its customers. ECC focuses on new developments, including the upscale and multipurpose Taylor Village and Waverly Woods in Ellicott City.

Focus on High-Quality Content
From the beginning, The Taylor Service Co., the developer behind Taylor Village and Waverly Woods, and consultant organization Sky Cable were focused on providing a high-level experience. They chose a satellite provider as the video provider, bringing an unparalleled user experience, both in channel lineup and optional pay-per-view programming lineups. For telephone service, ECC utilizes two services, a CLEC service and VoIP service. Internet services are provided through multiple bonded T-1 lines.

Customers can choose from a variety of packages, including an analog service package of channels, and/or many digital packages. Internet packages start at 3 Mb/sec and go up to 100 Mb/sec.

Enabling Technologies
ECC evaluated a variety of different technologies to provide service, including B-PON, E-PON and Ethernet Point-to-Point (PTP) architectures. Ultimately, ECC chose an Ethernet PTP architecture using two fibers to each home. Ethernet PTP is an excellent choice, as the two fibers ensure that the system will be future-proof, and provides up to 100 Mb/second symmetric bandwidth to each subscriber. This was an attractive feature relative to PON technologies, as PTP architectures do not share bandwidth the way that PON systems do. Use of the PTP platform ensures that an electronics upgrade won’t be needed until bandwidth requirements to each user are greater than 100 Mb/second. A second attractive feature of PTP architectures is that they are typically significantly less expensive to deploy than PON architectures, as the end electronics are typically less expensive than PON electronics. The added cost of the second fiber per home is typically not large enough to offset the significant savings generated by the electronics.

One of the fibers is used for voice and data services, with coarse WDM used to provide downstream connectivity at 1,550 nm, and upstream connectivity at 1,310 nm. The second fiber is used for video services at 1,550 nm. For video services, gear from Foxcom is used to provide the 3.5 GHz DirecTV satellite-based signal.

The passive plant is spliced, with drops spliced in pedestals, with one pedestal shared by approximately six homes, resulting in a high performance, high reliability network.

Spartanburg, S.C. - MFCI and Sunset Summits
Although it’s not well known outside of upstate South Carolina, Spartanburg County, S.C., has the largest amount of foreign capital investment per capita in the United States. A strong, textile-driven economy is in the process of morphing into a more diversified industrial base, anchored by BMW and its satellite suppliers, many of which are foreign-owned. The International Center for Automotive
Research (ICAR), just down Interstate 85, has the lofty goal of moving the nexus of the U.S. automotive industry from Detroit to South Carolina.

This major project is also attracting a diverse set of tenants. It’s the vision of Jeff Hesla, the CEO of Matrix Fiber Communication Systems LLC (MFCS) and one of the developers of Sunset Summits, a 325-plus home development in Duncan, S.C., to attract customers from these new ventures to his development. Hesla knows that the bandwidth offered by his FTTH system will be attractive to international workers looking to have on-demand teleconferencing, full-featured, Quality of Service-monitored VoIP telecommunications and other higher value services.

MFCS has chosen the two fiber Ethernet Point-to-Point, and the L-Band video solution, to deliver voice, data, video and security monitoring services to the development. The company also has plans to replicate this model with developers across the country. Immediately upon lighting the system, Sunset Summits residents will have more available bandwidth than any residential offering in upstate of South Carolina.

The Sunset Summits team is going the extra steps to make sure that potential homebuyers fully appreciate the capabilities that fiber brings. The team has provided seminars to builders and realtors to highlight the extra value and future-proofing that fiber provides. Traditional developers set standards for the materials, square footage, etc., used in homes. The Sunset Summits team has taken the same approach to the telecommunications network, by providing standards for in-home wiring and components to ensure that each homeowner can truly take advantage of the benefits of the technology. Given the interest from builders, homebuyers and other developers, Sunset Summits is setting the bar higher throughout South Carolina and beyond.

About the author:
Mark Boxer - Business Development, Access Solutions with AFL Telecommunications.
www.afltele.com
mark.boxer@afltele.com 

Fiber-to-the-Subscriber Products and Solutions