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By Tim Young
This month, we took a little time to speak to Joe Savage, the President of the Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) Council, the leading industry forum dedicated to advancing FTTH in the US and beyond. We spoke to Joe in last September's issue of Pipeline, (http://www.pipelinepub.com/0907/EC2_1.html) and thought we'd check in to see what's changed and what remains the same.
Pipeline: We spoke to you almost a year ago about the state of FTTH. What's changed in that timeframe?
Joe Savage: We're still seeing lots of growth in North America, especially in the United States. I mentioned before that North America was the fastest growing region [for FTTH] in the world, and that has continued. The number of households connected has continued to double for the second year. One-hundred percent annual growth is pretty darn good. We're at around 12-13 million homes passed, which is approximately 12% of homes in the US. We'll pass another 4-4.5 million homes in the next twelve months as well. Since the subscriber count is going up faster than the homes passed, our take rate is looking more and more favorable. We've gotten up to about a 28% take rate on average, but if you take Verizon out of the equation and look at the other 600 service providers out there, take rates for the smaller deployments are nearly 50%. Things are looking good. The only thing slowing deployment is that bucket trucks only go 55 miles an hour. Speeds have picked up as well. There are nearly 18,000 homes in the US that are connected to 100mbps downstream and upstream. Verizon, for example, is offering 50, 30, and a symmetric 20mbps.
 PL: In our previous conversation, I asked if FTTH could save telcos. You responded that it can, but is for more than just telcos. In the time since, has there been more of a response to FTTH from non-telcos, especially cablecos?
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Fifty years from now, we'll all be on a fiber connection. It's just a question of whether it'll be two, five, fifteen, or thirty years out when it gets to the further and further extended locations. |
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Savage: Well, it's early times for cable companies, and they're constrained. Wall Street doesn't want to hear about another investment wave by the cable companies. On the stealth side, they're putting FTTH in a lot of planned communities, greenfield developments. There's been some RFP activity among the largest cablecos. They're figuring out what it's going to cost. Additionally, there's been some cable-specific technologies, like RF over glass, which is essentially FTTH with a cable signal being delivered over it.
So the cable guys know that when they come up against FTTH, they're going to have a hard time keeping customers. They're doing things to boost capacity, like DOCSIS 3.0. Their VoIP deployments have been pretty successful. It's only where they have to compete against FTTH where they want to boost what they've got.
PL: Have you seen a ramp-up in FTTH rollout?
Savage: In municipalities, I would say that twelve months ago, there were probably thirty municipalities that had deployed their own community-owned networks. Now that's closer to forty-five or fifty. Some of them are getting quite substantial. Many big cities (Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis) are looking at building their own networks. For developers, it's becoming common practice. When the trenches are opened and they're putting in water and sewer, they're putting in fiber as well. They're convinced, and so are we, that it's an amenity that homeowners value, and that they'll sell lots more quickly and maybe for a little more money.
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