Extending fiber to every premise may be the endgame for service providers, but the reality is that many operators with existing copper networks can't financially justify that approach for either businesses or residential customers
To tackle the disparity, service providers are often opting for Fiber to the Home (FTTH)/Fiber to the Building (FTTB) in new neighborhoods, and a hybrid copper/fiber approach via Fiber to the Node (FTTN) or Fiber to the Curb/Cabinet (FTTC) in existing neighborhoods.
On the residential side, FTTN has a number of high profile followers, including U.S.-based carriers such AT&T (NYSE: T), CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) and Cincinnati Bell (NYSE: CBB), and European carriers such as BT (NYSE: BT) and Telekom Austria (NYSE: TKA).
Complementing existing and new DSL flavors, particularly ADSL2+ and VDSL2, are three key techniques that claim to theoretically squeeze more out of existing copper plant:
Dynamic Spectrum Management: Pioneered for DSL networks by John Cioffi, now CEO and Chairman of ASSIA, DSM enables service providers to enhance rate and reach by reducing or eliminating crosstalk and interference in a DSL network.
Vectoring: Like DSM, vectoring can also mitigate crosstalk issues that can effect large-scale deployments of DSL lines delivering 15 Mbps speeds and above. With the advent of DSM Level 3, a combination of DSM with vectored DSL, proponents claim the technology can not only help service providers expand their respective DSL speeds, but also provide information on how to isolate faults on the copper plant.
Phantom Mode DSL: DSL Phantom Mode creates what is called a virtual or "phantom" channel that supplements the two-pair wire configuration for copper transmission lines. Experimental lab tests conducted by both Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei demonstrated downstream transmission speeds of 300 Mbps and 700 Mbps downstream rate, respectively, over 400 meters.
But the utility of copper isn't just a consumer broadband data application. Copper is finding uses in the business services market and even in automobiles.
Incumbent and competitive carriers alike are seeing that the "gold" in copper is its ability to be a sound mechanism to deliver higher speed Ethernet services to businesses that were once out of the reach of their fiber network--via Ethernet over Copper (EoC).
Offering speeds that range from as low as 2 Mbps with the theoretical ability to climb to 50 and even 100 Mbps, EoC is putting higher speed IP-based Ethernet services in the hands of users that may not want or cannot afford the cost of an additional 1.5 Mbps T1 line, but want higher speeds. A growing base of traditional wireline telcos such as CenturyLink, Windstream and Hawaiian Telcom and CLECs such as Integra, MegaPath and XO are offering various flavors of EoC to area businesses.
Finally, the IEEE 802.3 standards group is developing a twisted-pair gigabit Ethernet standard supporting the automotive, industrial controls, avionics, and transportation industries. Similarly, the OPEN Alliance Special Interest Group (SIG) in conjunction with the University of New Hampshire-Interoperability Lab (UNH-IOL) is developing BroadR-Reach, a copper-based 100 Mbps Ethernet connectivity specification for the automotive industry.
