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FTTH ConFerenCe December 2007 | www.broadbandproperties.com | BROADBAND PROPERTIES | 29 A ttendees at this year 9s F**H Con8erence came away with renewed 8aith that no matter how much bandwidth they might provide, content providers will be able to \x3ll it. Tey were o ered less assurance about whether customers would be willing to pay. But even on that point, they saw many possibilities.

Only a 8ew have to pan out 8or network operators 3 and their vendors 3 to strike gold. Tat 9s especially evident as costs 8or building \x3ber networks continue to decline. Corning Ca- ble Systems unveiled more details about its nano- Structures bend-insensitive, staple-tolerant \x3ber.

Competitors like OFS counterpunched with \x3ber that can 9t be bent as much, but that is armored to take more abuse. Prices 8or network electronics o ela bd c: n 4w T 4ch b cl cg 8 4s, n 4w C c bc 4 e bs, n 4w H cp 4s f c e ec c b cm 8c D 4v 4l cpm 4 bt This year 9s FTTH Council meeting !ocused on lling the pipe with content that gets customers to open their wallets. Technical deployment advances sweetened the mood.

By Masha Zager ... more. less.

and Steven S. Ross Broadband Properties orLAnDo CoVerAGe AT A GLAnCe Orlando: New Technologies, New Concerns, New Hopes !or Economic Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | 29 Three Independent Telcos Tell Tales o! Fiber . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | 34 Marketing to End-Users. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | 37 What Do Developers Want? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | 39 BitTorrent: The Internet 9s 800-Pound Bandwidth Gorilla . . . . . . . . . . . . . | 41 Preparing !or the Exafood& and the Zettafood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | 43 What 9s Next !or Passive Optical Networks?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | 53 Running the Numbers !or Fiber. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | 55 Kathy Harriman, Senior VP, EPB Telecom and Chairman o. the FTTH Council board. Mike Hill, Chairman o. the 2007 FTTH Con.erence and President/ CEO o. OnTrac. Mike was recently named as the Chairman o. the FTTH Council board .or 2008. and passive components continued to 8all. And new ideas 8or outside plant deployment abounded. Put them all together, and overall network costs and time-to-build took a deep plunge. Proponents o8 video, interactive gaming, telepresence, telemedicine, security, online education and a myr- iad o8 Internet-based services ranging 8rom customer relations to auto sales all attracted attention. But so did the stumbling blocks 3 lack o8 an overall national broadband policy, an un- Photos by Steven S. Ross 30 | BROADBAND PROPERTIES | www.broadbandproperties.com | December 2007 FTTH ConFerenCe certain real estate market, and worries about a looming credit crunch. Con8erees were buoyed by the knowl- edge that \x3ber is more a solution than a problem. Fiber can help sell homes and help li8t local economies. Digital Rights Management Is the DRM issue an insurmountable barrier to bringing more content to \x3- ber-based networks? Sony is known as perhaps the biggest chawk d when it comes to pushing 8or DRM. But Mark Rizzo, VP 8or *echnology at Sony On- line Entertainment, demurred. He said there are ctwo requirements Sony has 8or 8uture advances in computer gam- ing: One is bandwidth& and the sec- ond one is bandwidth. d Te broadband market is still lim- ited, especially upstream, he said, cand it inhibits what we 9d like to do. Te typical game size is 5 to 7 GB, delivered on DVD, because direct-to-download is a pain8ul process. d Nevertheless, there are 4 million Sony Playstation3 9s installed, and they do more than just play games. Each has an 8-core processor, gigabit Ethernet port, Blu-Ray disc drive, HDMI 1080p, and up to an 80 GB hard drive. Te raw computing power is immense 3 more than 20 times that o8 a typical PC. Te distributed computing 8olding@home project, which inves- tigates protein 8old- ing problems (see 8olding.stan8ord. edu 8or details), has so8tware versions that individuals can download 8or Windows, Mac, and Linux machines as well as 8or the PS3. Te 175,000 Macs and PCs in the project achieve 157 *eraFLOPS [tril- lion foating point operations per sec- ond]. Te 38,000 PS3s achieve 958 *eraFLOPS. So the Sony game stations together, with less than a quarter o8 the CPUs, have six times the computing power. Independent \x3lm producers could use the same technique to push their ren- dering out to a user community. Tere is a group 8ocused on this, Rizzo said. Rizzo added that Sony sees cdynamic, user-generated content, streaming game experiences, true high-quality video communication, and much more. d Some network administrators and designers are worried that Sony 9s insis- tence on super-strong digital rights man- agement could clog networks with the need to veri8y every packet or stream. But Rizzo said cSony is still up in the air on DRM. d Copy protection is not inevitable, said Ed *empleman, director o8 market- ing at Pannaway, who predicted that the cdigital rights management d model will become cmore shaky d because it cre- stricts the market, and adds to cost and complexity. d He noted that BMG and others are going DRM-8ree in Europe and that Edgar Bron8man, head o8 War- ner Music here, who had been saying cno way d to dropping DRM, has now said he 9s cthinking about it. d I8 going DRM-8ree helps grow mu- sic markets, *empleman said, cmovies and *V will 8ollow. A8ter all, IP*V just started a 8ew years ago. d He noted that traditional *V is los- ing both ad revenue and viewers, so that providing a similar product over an IP network makes little sense. cApple *V was not a model, because o8 some machinations between Jobs and the net- works, d he said. (Te Apple appliance 8or downloaded video has sold only about 400,000 units, commercial sources say.) cVudu may be the holy grail 3 5,000 movies on the box, d he said. Te Vudu appliance and service 8or renting video content stores the start o8 every movie in Mark Rizzo, VP .or Technology at Sony Online Entertain- ment, said bandwidth is limiting what the company can do. Sean Stokes, attorney at The Baller Herbst Law Group, got a good laugh with this slide. December 2007 | www.broadbandproperties.com | BROADBAND PROPERTIES | 31 FTTH ConFerenCe its catalog in the home device, so users have instant access. It then streams the remainder on demand. Paid services like Apple *V tend to require downloading, which can take hours be8ore a video is ready to view. Free services like You*ube tend to stream content to users, typically at lower quality. Consider new headend investments with care, *empleman said, as content is already starting to bypass traditional headend sources. Vudu uses distributed peer-to-peer transactions to cut down- load time, he noted. cPeer-to-peer with substantial bandwidth demands is new. Joost distributes 8ull-screen SD. But HD is coming there. Tere can be a chat ses- sion going on between viewers watching a clip, which builds up a social network. d Where does the money to run the network come 8rom? *empleman sug- gested upstream ad insertion, third parties sponsoring bandwidth as part o8 promotional packages, and more product placement within the content. He said it is possible that consumers will pay 8or premium tiered bandwidth service. cYou will be able to have so8t- ware and systems to do target advertis- ing, and you will be able to charge 8or the premium pipe at a given QoS. But walled gardens are gone. d When it comes to bandwidth, he said, cGo big, go now [with install- ing new high-bandwidth networks]. F**H already has 8avorable economics versus copper. d Why? cIt took 200 years to \x3ll the li- brary o8 Congress with 57 million docu- ments, 29 million books, and 12 million photos. An equal amount o8 digital in- 8ormation is generated 100 times a day worldwide, d he said. He also noted that new types o8 equipment, such as ON*s that have a MoCA port 8or distribution over coax within the house, make it eas- ier to adapt to 8uture needs. *erry Denson o8 Verizon put it this way: Verizon FiOS is already o ering on Line Exhibitor Photo Scrapbook www.broadbandproperties.com FTTH Chair Kathy Harriman presents Jim Farmer, Wave7 Optics 9 chie. technical o\x3cer, with the Chairman 9s Award, which singles out an individual or organization that has shown tremendous e\x2ort to advance ber. Farmer holds 90 patents, mainly in set-top box technol- ogy, including encryption. Last year 9s winner was the State o. Texas .or statewide .ranchising. Patrick Sims o. ADC gets into the Orlando spirit. The FTTx Excellence Award went to Ron Troyer (le.t), Outside Plant and Central O\x3ce Manager at Union Telephone, which operates in the Northeast, main- ly in New Hampshire. Union was the rst telco in the state to deploy FTTH. Pre- senting the award was Steve Hardy. This event will be a HOME RUN for all the players in the game of Fiber-to-the-Home 2008 Broadband Properties Summit Co-sponsored by the FTTH Council April 28 3 30, 2008 cMaking the Business Case for Fiber d www.bbpmag.com 32 | BROADBAND PROPERTIES | www.broadbandproperties.com | December 2007 FTTH ConFerenCe more than 400 linear channels and more than 10,000 VoD titles. But Ve- rizon cwants customers to think we are more important than the content pro- vider. We 8ocus on what the customer wants 3 VoD allows them to choose the time they watch shows. We o er wid- gets, interactive *V with polling, trivia, shopping and advertising. We 9re bring- ing in content 8rom the Internet, 8or hy- per niches. d cWe think the distributor replaces the content provider [in terms o8 power] because the distributor has the best met- rics and provides interactive services, d Denson said. It 9s not the triple play that 9s important. Integrated services are important! Hewlett-Packard is already selling LCD high-de\x3nition *Vs with 8eatures that make it easier 8or consumers to pull programming o the Web without a com- puter. James Sandusky, VP o8 HP 9s digi- tal *V solutions business, agreed with Sony. Home networking so 8ar is PC- centric but that will change, he said, and become more entertainment-centric. Sandusky also said the *V revolution is happening 8aster than was originally projected. cIt took 27 years to achieve 85 percent household penetration 8or color *V, but it will take only 11 years 8or digital, d he said. Almost 30 million sets a year are sold in the US, and only digital sets can now be sold. Most o8 those sets are now HD, at least to the 720p standard. Increas- ingly, consumers are opting 8or top-o8- the-line 1080i. c*V is a gateway to the Internet and to *V services, AND to the user 9s video, audio, and pictures, d he said. cIn \x3ve years, consumers will get a good share o8 their content 8rom the Internet, hence the need 8or a broad pipe into the home, and 8or a home network. d In the 30 million networked homes consumers will have 5 *B o8 data in \x3ve years, Sandusky said. But o8 the 27 mil- lion sets sold in the US this year, only 100,000 will be networked, with an Ethernet jack or WiFi built in. HP has just begun marketing net- worked *Vs, along with its MediaSmart product line. Te new MediaSmart server will have up to 12 *B o8 disk space. TV or not TV Jim Farmer, C*O at Wave7 Optics, said cable companies are clearly having trou- ble accommodating new services. cWe 9ve seen the pendulum swing back toward IP*V as it gets closer to being competi- tive. Most o8 our customers are planning RF 8or the basic tier so that subscribers won 9t need S*Bs, and some are putting premium tiers and VoD on IP*V. Te vast majority are still going broadcast, with IP*V as the premium tier. d cTe cablecos told Wall Street they were \x3nished with their upgrades. A lot o8 them are trying to solve the problem with switched digital *V. It will work, but it doesn 9t save a lot o8 bandwidth i8 December 2007 | www.broadbandproperties.com | BROADBAND PROPERTIES | 33 FTTH ConFerenCe you have a lot o8 channels on the ana- log tier. You could put the traditional 70 analog channels onto SD*V 8or people who have set-top boxes, but you 9re still not saving a lot. cIt 9s also 8airly expensive. *o get real bene\x3ts 8rom it, you have to reclaim a lot o8 analog channels. Comcast is do- ing this, but *WC is not. How 8ar they can go, no one knows. It 9s a Band-Aid that will hold o F**H 8or another \x3ve years. Tey know they 9ll have to do it eventually 3 it 9s a matter o8 when, not i8. cTey 9re counting on DOCSIS 3.0 but that doesn 9t really get you there, it 9s still orders o8 magnitude away. With DOCSIS 3.0 you can provide 100 Mbps to an individual customer, but not to a lot o8 customers. And there 9s no upstream bandwidth 3 it 9s much more crippled upstream than downstream. d Copper to Fiber Kabel-X exhibited a clever way to deploy \x3ber in densely populated environments: Push \x3ber through a copper cable. Well, not literally. Kabel-X uses a biodegrad- able fuid to pull the copper out and push the \x3ber in. Te fuid 8ormula is adapted 8or each project. It 9s been avail- able since 2003, used in Europe, Asia, and A8rica. Te company recently 8ound a partner in the US and launched opera- tions here. First, you \x3nd the buried cable, and pull out one end. You pump the fuid in, and when it emerges 8rom the other end the cable is ready to be pulled out o8 its insulating shell. Fasten a winch, extract the copper core, then pull or blow the cable in. It supposedly works 8or any size ca- ble. Fiber is narrower than the copper cable being replaced, so \x3ber network builder might want to use ducts to \x3ll the void. Te approach does not need permits, machines 8or digging, or labor. It is also much 8aster 3 each crew can do 2000 8eet a day. In practice, a crew might start at the beginning o8 a subdivision, and replace a small amount o8 copper at a time. Te \x3- ber builders maintain services with wire- less. Tey would establish a connection 8or each customer, put the wireless in be8ore they start, then replace the cop- per, and swap over to \x3ber. Tey leave the wireless in place, so it can be used 8or \x3xed-mobile convergence, or 8or upgrad- ing mobile phone service to data. Kabel-X expects its US customers to be mostly telcos. Tere are no North American sales yet, but they claim they are getting a lot o8 interest 8rom smaller telcos. *elcos can also recycle the copper. Usually (without Kabel-X) the copper just stays in place, taking up space in the manhole runs. It might be time to recycle those pre- conceived notions about what *V is, and what products might \x3ll the pipe. BBP Contact the Authors Masha can be reached at masha@broadbandproperties.com; Steve at steve@broadbandproperties.com. Corning displayed its Evolant line and its new bend-insensitive ber at the show. Fiber that can be stapled, thanks to its fexible but tough Kevlar armor, .rom OFS. New micronode .rom Alloptic converts incoming ber signal to coax-borne RF, and also has ber output that can light an ONT. This duct being modeled by Emtelle 9s Dan Gra\x2 is designed to be inserted into sur.ace-grooved pavement, then cemented over.

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