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The World Wide Wheee!
( 2/28/00; 10:00 AM EST) "Fiber to the curb" is the current Holy Grail when it comes toall-you-can-eat bandwidth for offices and homes. If you replace the phone companies' sometimes hundred-year-old copper wires with glass strands that can carry gigabytes per second, then the World Wide Wait becomes the World Wide Wheee! (OK, there are always other bottlenecks, but a fiber link for the "lastmile" would make a huge difference.) Indeed, according to a Strategis Group report, 23 million U.S. households are interested in high-speedaccess. Strategis likens this growing demand to "water behind a dam." The problem is, the entrenched phone and cable companies are (somewhat understandably) not rushing out to dig up all of our streets and bury end-user fiber in place of their $100 billion worth of copper, except in some very high-density city areas. So they and competitors are (slowly) pursuing ways to leverage the three copper networks that already hit most buildings: phone wires, cable TV, and the power grid. And we're also getting close to pressing satellites into service, which we'll discuss later in this issue. But the allure of the far faster "fiberto the curb" is strong enough that some people won't wait. Internet Fiber is developing "last mile" fiber networks for new neighborhoods, which are installed as the area is built. It's paid for, and owned, not by a monopoly business, but by the homeowners themselves. Essentially, the company installs at least two fibers from a neighborhood network access point to each home or office, and works with the builders to provide Ethernet wiring throughout each home or office. The resulting neighborhoodnetwork, essentially paid for through each mortgage, is owned by a neighborhood association that has the ability to purchase bulkInternet service from Internet Fiber, or from other suppliers in the future. Who Wins? Who should win from this and similar efforts to "wire" new construction with threads of glass? Builders win, because their new fibered communities have a (so far) unique attribute: huge bandwidth to each building, which could be a strong selling point for telecommuters and other Internet-based businesses. People who want no-hassle, high-speed Internet access win. (You can get high-speed access today, but the hassle factor is enormous -- I'm still waiting for my high-speed line, over two months after it was ordered.) And the growing Internet-based economy wins, as it no longer requires tremendously expensive downtown office space to run a global business. Fordham University assistant professor Sumita Raghuran expects telecommuting to increase ten times over the next five years. This fiber-based, very high-speed access will be a good thing, because I suspect the use of multimedia, including good quality video and bandwidth-intensive services we have yet to define, will continue to consume today's high-speed bandwidth alternatives. It may not be too long before anything less than a fiber's hundreds (or more) of megabytes per second of end-user bandwidth will seem like, well, a 9600-baud modem. Who Loses? Who loses? Over time, the entrenched monopolies, if they don'tchange. And I don't just mean the phone companies, since once such neighborhood fiber networks are in place, they can also carry cable TV, as well as local phone service. (The power company is still safe...) What Changes? And what changes? If enough communities develop fiber-based high-speed access, some of the downtown and other areas where people conduct their business, in part because of network infrastructure, might find tenants moving their knowledge-based businesses into or near their homes. University of Georgia professor Patrick McKeown inthe Feb. 16 Washington Post said pervasive high-speed Internet access may have asignificant effect, for good or for ill, on our society. "It's almost like we're back in Nebraska in 1910 in a homestead,where it was just you and your family and you wouldn't see anyone else for days," McKeown said. "We had a period of urbanization, now we're going back to what is almost a rural lifestyle -- a homestead within your house." Needless to say, Internet Fiber isn't the only fiber game in town. Some phone companies, such as BellSouth, are conducting trials and, in the case of a Dunwoody, Ga., community, they'reinstalling permanent fiber-to-the-curb facilities. Similarly, Canadian Futureway is fibering-up20,000 homes in the Toronto area. Portland, Ore.; Denver; andColorado City, Co., will also be getting pockets of glassconnectivity. Nevertheless, finding "fiber to the curb" on a real estate listing is still rather rare (a quick search of some home sale sites didn't turn up a single one.) But I know quite a few people who, if they were considering buying a home, would easily choose one with fiber-speed Internet access over a similar home without it, even at a premium price. (We've already seen this in some New York apartment buildings). If I were developing a new subdivision, I'd give the idea some careful thought... © 1998 CMP Media, Inc. |
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