AT&T and FTTN
I was reading an article over at Ars Technica about AT&T and their issue getting Fiber and Television service to customers.
See, AT&T wasn’t going to spend a lot of money on their broadband. They never have. What they intended to do to compete with Verizon’s FIOS was to use the existing fiber they had planned to put out to their neighborhoods and then leverage the existing copper to the house and use VDSL instead to achieve fast speeds. This is why it’s taken them forever to finally roll this out. It wasn’t until Feb 2006 that VDSL as we know it was standardized. Previous to that it was an Infineon (Israeli company) based chipset that Broadcom also licensed. In essence it was 10Base-S, but because the IEEE 10Base Committee was disbanded in 1997, they would not re-seat to approve a new technology. ADSL hardware providers used this against Infineon to sell against them, claiming that why should someone use a non-certified technology. The true benefit of 10Base-S was that it provided 15mbps of symmetric throughput at short (less than 3000 feet) loop lengths. Perfect for the Hotel Market. The other benefit of 10BaseS was that it had built in CPE device feedback to the head end; it could tell if there was remote link, what speed that link was at, and a true remote report of RSSI and interference. In that sense, just like Betamax was to VHS, 10Base-S was a far superior technology than ADSL.
Today’s VDSL uses tried and true DMT encoding on the line, rather than QAM. Telco’s are much more friendly to DMT. It does lose the ability to do real remote troubleshooting, I don’t think that Ikanos had put forward in-line CPE reporting. VDSL (or VDSL2) has been tested to do over 100mbps Symmetrical and even 200mbps Symmetrical at short loop lengths. It’s not like having a real Multi-Mode fiber terminate at your house, but it allows for AT&T to save money and time in deployment.
But yet again, the Internet’s Village Idiot, Ed Whitaker, wants to hijack the process that unfortunately every other Telco has to go thru. People here in New Jersey bemoan the fact that they don’t have FIOS yet in their area. What they don’t know is the same reason their taxes are so high is the problem with FIOS. New Jersey requires the telcos (and before them, the cable companies) to negotiate with every township, rather than allow them to negotiate at a much higher (county or region) level. New Jersey has over 560 seperate townships. (A reason taxes are so high is that with 560+ townships, there is an incredible amount of redundancy of services; seperate Police/Fire/Administration for almost each and every township = lots of redundant government workers).
I can understand AT&T’s frustration, but welcome to the game Ed, the cable companies have had to do this before you, and I don’t think it’s fair to allow you to jump to the head of the line.
