Does Cable Need Fiber to the Home?

I had an interesting comment on Tuesday's post about increasing Internet capacity demands.  Here's an excerpt:

"Cable companies may have to accelerate their deployment of DOCSIS 3.0 to help meet increasing demand, and may begin to deploy passive optical networks to keep pace with telco deployments." This seems a bit contradictory. DOCSIS 3.0 is supposed to yield 100 mb/s and theoretically make fttp unnecessary. While I believe DOCSIS will present its own set of challenges in the medium term, Cable Co's seem comfortable with testing results.

Good question...why would Cable consider deploying fiber optic networks to the home, especially when their public statements indicate that DOCSIS 3.0 should be plenty good enough to meet competition from the likes of Verizon's FiOS fiber-to-the home service?  According to Comcast, their initial DOCSIS 3.0 rollout will provide top speeds of 100 Mbps, certainly much higher than the 5, 15, and 30 Mbps packages advertized on Verizon's web site. 

But the cable companies are actually signing deals with passive optical network vendors such as Alloptic, who says they have signed 21 deals with cable operators, including two tier 1 cable companies. We haven't heard announcements from the big cable companies themselves, though, presumably because they are afraid of spooking the stock market into thinking they have a major new wave of capex coming. 

So, the cable companies are buying fiber-to-the-home gear, but aren't admitting it to the public. Next week, I'll be doing a little series of posts on why the cable companies would deploy this technology, with the first few posts focusing on laying a foundation for understanding the current cable distribution architecture and its limitations.  Once we get that in place, we'll start to address the question of why cable companies might want to deploy fiber to the home.

Comments

[sezer]

Fiber Optic Cabling -Training - Technical Support (Training) - Information Web Site - - http://fiberoptic-cable.blogspot.com

[Parkite]

looking forward to the posts on this....