FTTH Frequently Asked Questions

Q. What is fiber to the home?
A. Fiber to the home (FTTH) is the delivery of a communication signal over optical fiber from the operator's switching equipment all the way to a home. It replaces the existing copper infrastructure such as telephone wires or coaxial cable. Fiber to the home is a relatively new and fast growing method of providing vastly higher bandwidth to consumers to enable more robust video, internet and voice services.

Q. Why is fiber optic cable now being conected directly to homes?
A. Connectiong homes directly to fiber optic cable enables enormous improvements in the bandwidth that can be provided to consumers, both now and for many decades of accelerating bandwidth demand. While cable modems generally provide transmission speeds of anywhere between 5 and 50 megabits per second on the download (and are generally much slower when uploading), current fiber ooptic technology can provide two-way transmission speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second, with 10 gig systems now coming to market and even higher bandwidth fiber networks now being developed. Further, while cable and DSL providers are struggling to squeeze small increments of higher bandwidth out of their technologies, ongoing improvements in fiber optic equipment are constantly increasing available bandwidth without having to change the fiber. That's why fiber networks are said to be "future proof."

Q. Why do we need all that bandwidth? Aren't cable and DSL systems good enough for what most poeple want to do?
A. This is the age of video over Internet. Increasingly, consumers are using their Internet connections to view television programs from content providers like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon, in addition to the growing number of websites that provide video in some form. Over the past several years, since the introduction of the video sharing site YouTube, video has grabbed and ever-larger share of total IP traffic and is now the Internet's leading application. One high-definition movie takes up as much bandwidth as 35,000 web pages. In the meantime, a growing number of companies are offering "software as a service" - meaning you subscribe to application on the net rather than install them on your own computer. These "cloud computing" applications are now available for word processing, emailing, automated remote file backup, and a host of business and personal services. All of these applications and many others we haven't even dreamed of yet, are going to require much greater bandwidth than what is generally available today, even from "broadband" providers such as Comcast. While many cable modem services have thus far kept up with steadily growing consumer demand for more bandwidth, DSL services such as Frontier and TDS have struggled to do so. It remains to be seen how much longer cable modems, which use copper in the last-mile, are going to be able to keep pace - especially given Cisco's forecast that IP traffic will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 34 percent in the years to come.

Q. Is a 100% fiber network really necessary?
A. We have no reason to believe that innovation in Internet applications and services will ever slow down. In fact, all signs point toward their acceleration as high-defiintion video, telemedicine, distance learning, telecommuting and many other broadband applications come to the market. Only fiber to the home is going to be able to deliver the bandwidth we are going to need far into the future.


Information obtained from www.ftthcouncil.org.