I’ve been asking whether fiber to the desktop ought to be considered now as we look ahead to 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and mostly your answers have been “no.” But a start-up recently contacted me with a very different perspective.

The start-up is ClariPhy, which until now has been in what it calls “stealth mode.” The company was formed to make 10 Gigabit Ethernet over fiber optics affordable for enterprise firms.

CEO Paul Voois says he looked at what other start-ups were doing to bring 10 Gigabit to copper, and the technical hurdles involved there - and realized that the hurdles with 10 Gigabit on fiber had mainly to do with cost. If someone could cut that cost, 10 Gigabit over fiber would be on more even footing with 10 Gigabit over copper. It might even have an edge.

To that end, ClariPhy is developing an integrated circuit to cut the costs. The biggest cost associated with fiber today is in the optical components - lasers and photodetectors and the like, Voois says. ClariPhy’s silicon will be designed to make it so that you can use cheaper enterprise-grade rather than carrier-grade components.

“The performance isn’t as good, but that’s OK because our silicon makes up for it,” he says.

The company plans to begin sampling its chips in a year, and Voois predicts that the physical interface for fiber will cost the same as the copper interface by 2008. By 2010, he thinks fiber will be at a price point where you could start considering it for the desktop.

With cost the same, fiber can win out on two other factors, he says. The first is reach - the fiber-optic approach can get you 300 meters, while Category-6 copper is limited to 55 meters for 10 Gigabit. (As I’ve mentioned before, however, augmented versions of Cat-6 are coming available to take 10 Gigabit to 100 meters.)

The second factor is power consumption. Voois says typical fiber interfaces would use around 3 watts, while 10GBase-T operates at 10 watts to 20 watts.

Will these factors be enough to tilt the scales to fiber, despite all the reservations outlined in previous newsletters? That’s unclear to me, but Voois thinks so.

“Sooner or later copper is going to run out of gas, and we think that time is now,” he says.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.