Industry ready for triple play? Sort of - For Starters

The mood was decidedly upbeat at the USTA Telecom03 annual event in mid-October. And why should it not have been, even though the much-anticipated turnaround in the industry has yet to materialize? The bullish mood was summed by USTA president and CEO Walter McCormick in his state of the telecom industry presentation: "Every company you see on the screens [behind me] is into the triple play," McCormick said.

With a decline in minutes-of-use and access line growth, not to mention the cable operators who are muscling into the telcos' traditional voice business, ILECs and IOCs are being pressed to add video to their quiver of services. "There's very real competition from the cable operators who are beginning to offer voice, and this is a very scary proposition because, unlike the CLECs, the cable operators aren't regulated to extent of the wireline carriers," said Kevin Walsh, vice president of marketing for Calix.

Although Alltel and CenturyTel are among the larger carriers that have deployed the Calix platform, which is capable of delivering fiber-based OC-n and Ethernet services, Walsh admits that most of the more than 100,000 ports that Calix has shipped are being used by small, largely rural telcos for voice and DSL-based Internet access. But while Walsh believes the maturity of video-over-DSL technologies will, in time, find a place with the RBOCs, Ryan Koontz, marketing director for Advanced Fibre Communications, disagrees, noting the RBOCs are nowhere near contemplating sending IP video streams to DSL subscribers. "IP video solutions are not yet plug-and-play. The RBOCs have a huge challenge on their hands in rolling out video and they're going to be more comfortable with offering RF-based video [as opposed to IP video] over fiber," Koontz said.

Exactly what the RBOCs' game plan is when it comes to offering video is something of a mystery. Although the equipment industry is atwitter over the combined FTTP (fiber to the premises) procurement that is currently underway by BellSouth, SBC and Verizon, neither the carriers nor the vendors are willing to discuss the details of the buy. What's clear is that the heretofore nomenclature of FTTX has now been subsumed by the P in FTTP. And it also seems clear that what the RBOCs want is ATM-based PON (passive optical networking) technology for lighting up the fiber.

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The industry buzz has Alcatel, AFC and a Motorola-Quantum Bridge team as the finalists, although others such as Fujitsu, which is paired with start-up PON vendor Entrisphere, Siemens and a Nortel/ECI Telecom combo are also said to be in the running. While AFC is better known as a BLC (broadband loop carrier) vendor, it recently began offering a plug-in card that upgrades its AccessMAX platform to an OLT (optical line terminal). With the ability to connect to Class 5 switches via GR-303/TR-08/TR-57 interfaces, AFC claims to have the only FTTP solution with an integrated voice gateway. In mid-November, Verizon and AFC signed a letter of agreement for the active portion of the network, and the two have engaged in lab trials.

Unlike Quantum Bridge and Optical Solutions, which have their genesis as pure PON vendors, ECI Telecom also has cards to convert its Hi-FOCuS DSLAM into an OLT with the addition of a PON card. In a PON, each port on the OLT can support up to 32 ONTs (optical network terminals) located at or near customer premises to provide service interfaces ranging from POTS, ATM, Fast Ethernet and coax video. The FSAN (full service access network) standard supported by all four of the RBOCs as well as other carriers defines an ATM-based PON that supports 622 Mbps bandwidth downstream and 155 Mbps upstream. A PON network can also handle hundreds of broadcast video channels since these are carried on a separate wavelength from the ATM-based traffic.

Because they aren't required to unbundle the fiber to competitors, Dan Doczy, vice president of marketing and business development for ECI Telecom, believes the RBOCs are serious about pushing fiber closer to customers. "RBOCs are promoting FTTP as a cost reduction over maintaining old plant, particularly in the Northeast region, because it costs more to maintain copper pairs than replace them, and this way they also get rid of outside network elements like DLCs (digital loop carriers) and remote DSLAMs," notes Doczy.

Meanwhile, it appears that each of the RBOCs behind the FTTP buy are following their own FTTP path. Verizon, which appears to be the most aggressive, has said it plans to "pass" 500,000 to 1 million homes next year, in places ripping out the copper plant and replacing it with fiber. BellSouth and SBC are expected to put fiber in greenfield deployments. At least where BellSouth is concerned, it seems that some customers may be directly on fiber whereas as others, say eight to 12 subscribers, might share an ONT. "Once you get fiber within about 200-500 feet of the customer, you can complete [the connection] with coax because then the physics of the copper is no longer an issue," said Peter Hill, BellSouth vice president of technical planning and deployment. While FTTP offers a future-proof architecture that could support video, for the near term BellSouth is eyeing fiber as a medium for high-speed data services, says Hill.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Horizon House Publications, Inc.
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