In the May issue of EE Product News, I wrote a column entitled "Fiber to the Curb" and noted that I had seen Verizon workers installing fiber optic cable along the utility poles in my backyard. The first response I received to that column was from an engineer at Tellabs informing me that Verizon was not installing "Fiber to the Curb" but "Fiber to the Home." With "Fiber to the Home," the fiber runs all the way to the house and is terminated there at a box. Tellabs is the provider of that equipment to Verizon. Tellabs also has a Fiber to the Curb (FTTC) system that runs fiber to the customer's backyard, and then some electronics there distributes it to eight to 10 homes through the copper phone wire that is already in place. BellSouth is the major user of FTTC technology.
I tried to order the the new service, called Verizon FiOS, back in May, but it was not ready to deploy at the point. A Verizon technician finally arrived in late July to do the installation, which was fairly involved. I had to allow four hours for it. Basically, the technician removed the copper cable that went from the utility pole to my house, replaced it with fiber cable, and terminated it in the aforementioned Tellabs box, which is rather big at about 12" by 15". The technician informed me that I could get four phone lines as well as the Internet service, and showed me the five jacks in the box. From the box, he ran two copper wires into my house, one for a standard phone line and the other for the broadband connection. The latter was terminated with an RJ-45 jack. From this jack you connect to a wireless router, provided by Verizon, and then to one or more computers. Goodbye cable modem.
The first thing everyone asks me is, "How fast is it?" The answer is twofold. For ordinary web surfing, I don't see much of a difference between cable modem speed and FTTH. For downloads, though, FTTC is significantly faster, and it should be. The service I signed up for has a speed of 15 Mbps. I decided to time one of my downloads, so that anyone who reads this can have a standard to check against. I selected the Mouser Catalog, full version, to download just so that anyone who takes the time will have something useful after the download is complete. The file is 121 MB, and it took me 1 minute 27 seconds to download. You don’t even need a stopwatch, since Windows tells you how long the download takes. (I did, however, check it against my stopwatch and the two times matched up.) Here’s the link to the Mouser file:http://www.mouser.com/index.cfm?handler=catalog._ShowForm&mode=new#DOWNLOAD.
Click on "Download the catalog." You'll see Mouser catalog download options. For the "Full Catalog," click on "Download Now." A dialog box comes up that asks "Do you want to open or save this file?" Click on "Save." Pick the location you want to save and again click on "Save." That's it. The file will download, and when it's complete, it will tell you how long the download took.
This blog entry might end here were it not for a second "Letter to the Editor" that I received from a gal in Port Orford, Oregon. Essentially, she told me to "shut up already" about this fiber optic service. Her point was that her small town was never going to see fiber optic service, and that she was going to be stuck with dial up service for a long time unless she wanted to fork up significant dollars for a satellite connection to the Internet. I exchanged a few emails with her and basically admitted that I hadn't really thought much about all those people out there who don't live in or near a big city, who probably won't ever have a chance to sign up for reasonably priced broadband service.
Not long after this conversation, I received the July 18th copy of Newsweek in the mail. In it is an article entitled "Pulling the Plug on Local Internet" by Steven Levy. Apparently, there is a battle going on in Congress over municipal wireless, better known as muni Wi-Fi (check out a company called Tropos, www.tropos.com, for a fuller explanation of this). With this technology a city can deliver broadband Internet at an affordable price to anyone within its boundaries. I'm not sure if this technology applies in places like Port Orford, but I am sure that broadband Internet service must eventually be as pervasive—and affordable—as plain old telephone service.
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