I had Verizon’s 5M bit/sec FiOS fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service installed last week and got curious about how it worked so I called the company for more information.
Verizon says it started deploying FiOS in May 2004 and today is rolling it out in targeted communities in 15 of the 28 states the company serves. By year-end FiOS will pass 3 million homes and business, which is 10% of Verizon’s 30 million wireline customer base and roughly the number of DSL customers Verizon has today.
The service supports three data rates: 5M bit/sec downstream/2M bit/sec upstream for $39.95 per month; 15M/2M for $49.95; or 30M/5M for $199.95. And by the end of the year the company plans to use the same fiber plant to offer 300 channels of digital video and music and video on demand.
For current DSL customers the FiOS upgrade is a hard deal to pass up because the monthly rate is the same and the installation is free. The latter includes running the fiber, installing the optical network terminal (ONT) on the house and a battery backup indoors, running CAT5e to the primary computer, providing a four-port router and configuring one PC for use with the service.
The Verizon architecture is based on the Broadband Passive Optical Network standard, with 622M bit/sec fibers run into neighborhoods and passively split (no electronics used) into 32 individual fiber runs, each house getting roughly 20M bit/sec of capacity.
The ONT, which converts the photonic signal back to electronic, has four telephone ports, a 10/100 Ethernet data port and a coax port for video. Video will be carried over a separate wavelength of light – its own 800 MHz channel – and will not sap data capacity.
ATM is used as the Layer 2 signaling protocol, meaning Ethernet and voice traffic are encapsulated in ATM cells. VoIP isn’t used today, but a spokesman says newer ONTs will make that possible next year. The company will also begin deploying some gigabit PON in 2006.
What’s all of this costing? Verizon will say only that it spent $1 billion on FiOS last year and capital spending is up roughly 15% this year to $15.3 billion, the extra money primarily earmarked for broadband wireline and broadband wireless deployments.
Network World columnist Thomas Nolle, president of technology analysis firm CIMI, says FTTH costs telcos $1,000 to $1,500 per customer. As such, the services will be rolled out only where carriers can expect substantial average revenue per user (ARPU). “We estimate that about 20% of the population could generate enough ARPU to justify FTTH,” Nolle says.
Does it work? Without a hitch. Life at 5M bit/sec is different.
