American Fiber Systems has deployed high-capacity, high-bandwidth metropolitan fiber optic cable in several cities, including Atlanta, GA; Boise, ID; Cleveland, OH; Kansas City KS/MO; Las Vegas, NV; Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN, Nashville, TN; Reno, NV; and Salt Lake City, UT.
Rusin, a featured speaker at the Executive Telecom Briefings Conference: Internet Supply and Demand, The Effect of Video & New Internet Applications on Network Infrastructure Opportunities, being held this week at the Boston University School of Business, highlighted factors affecting the demand for overall interactive media experience.
According to Rusin, on-line media has the opportunity to be highly targeted, personalized and presence-integrated unlike any other media form. However, Rusin warns before these synergistic benefits can be realized between buyers and sellers -- the ability to deliver a rich, integrated experience inclusive of fully interactive customized video, requires an extensive local network overhaul in the United States. The fully enriched experience and reliability that the Internet should provide will require bandwidth connectivity much higher than the capability of today's copper facilities. Rusin believes, following the Korea and Japan models, broadband for an enriched on-line experience, today starts minimally at 100 megabits and within three years will increase to 200 megabits.
Rusin addressed three potential bottlenecks based upon today's network architectures -- Fiber to the Pedestal or FTTP, DOCSIS 3.0 Cable Modems and Broadband over Power Lines (BPL). "I know I'm going out on a limb in raising these points," said Rusin, "There are underlying technical beliefs, bordering on religion, that get in the way of delivering the quality of an experience. Most users of the Internet do not care much about our industry acronyms or techno speak -- they want a reliable and rich experience predicated on enough reliable bandwidth to do so when, where and as needed."
Rusin foresees FTTP installations subject to attenuation signal loss of bandwidth from the pedestal interface to the copper which runs to a business or home. Attenuation loss means it may cost more to regenerate signals and/or the carrying capacity of the signal is greatly reduced.
Rusin also called into question the viability of newly minted cable modems, which have adopted the DOCSIS 3.0 standards as a competitive alternative to Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH) or Fiber-To-The-Building implementations. The DOCSIS 3.0 stream of 120 megabits will not provide an enriched media experience for several reasons. First, the cable network, by design, is a shared network -- it runs video, data and voice applications concurrently over copper based coax across multiple end points. The cable network DOCSIS counterpart, DSL or digital subscriber line -- provides a better throughput opportunity because the copper is dedicated to a user and is not shared among other user end points. However, in either case, when compared with optics or silicon-based spectrum, copper has limitations from a physics perspective. Reliability and cost of unit delivery, when compared to fiber are also limited.
Rusin also discounts claims leading to Broadband over Power Lines as a mass market IP medium as having guaranteed limitations. Though power lines are ubiquitous, they are also made of copper. BPL trials conducted so far have been inconclusive. A byproduct of these early trials has seen several early adopters exiting the technology. Anecdotally, the limited BPL results have a few BPL providers now over-building the power grid with fiber. If BPL was viable -- why would you fiber the power grid? In addition, if you are going to fiber the power grid, it would make more sense to offer wi-fi or WiMAX and wireless backhaul which has a greater bandwidth capacity, albeit not close to fiber, but greater than power distribution copper. BPL is the ISDN of the new millennium -- lots of promise theoretically -- a niche market at best.
Rusin concluded that the underlying inefficiencies of copper infrastructure are, in his opinion, underlying the national debate on network neutrality. "Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft MSN and other content integrators of the new media era recognize the limitations of the customer experience over copper while metropolitan fiber pipes enable the rich experience," added Rusin, "I find trying to regulate the Internet an absurdity. It would be like regulating browsers or search engines, such as Google, around search neutrality as well. An open, competitive market will sort things out."
