Has Your Broadband Had Its Fiber?

Falling costs, new technology, and competition, with a nudge from regulatory changes, are bringing fiber closer to homes in the U.S. just a few years after the idea seemed all but written off. Verizon Communications, the country's largest regional carrier, is scheduled to launch commercial fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service by the end of the third quarter to about 100,000 potential customers in the Dallas area. The other two major incumbent carriers, SBC Communications and BellSouth, are pursuing their own strategies to get fiber into homes or neighborhoods and deliver a multi-megabit bandwidth boost to DSL.

Though U.S. carriers use fiber-optic cable for long-haul connections and some enterprise links, they serve most homes and businesses via copper lines up to several miles long. Partly as a result of that, typical DSL services provide less than 2 megabits per second. Putting in fiber instead of copper opens the door to services measured in the tens of megabits per second, enough to easily deliver multimedia services such as video programming and online games.

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