1. Fiber is inexpensive, and cost is everything in delivering local loop broadband. The cost of typical fiber cable is outweighed by the cost of installing that cable and other costs associated with delivering broadband service.
2. Fiber provides tremendous bandwidth. Bandwidth is the primary reason fiber is replacing copper in the local loop. Fiber has been shown to deliver thousands of Gbps in lab applications, and it is certainly under no stress providing the rates used in local loop applications. Copper local loops cannot provide anything approaching the bandwidth of fiber local loops. The constraining factor for local loop applications is the cost of the optical components required to provide a certain bandwidth. These components must operate in the rigorous environment that local loop equipment experiences, not just the friendly environment of the lab. Optical transceivers are much easier to manufacture to inside requirements of 0 – 50C than to the OSP requirements of –40C to + 65C, so the OSP rated components are more expensive. As rates increase (for instance from 2.5 Gbps to 10 Gbps), the cost difference can become even more prominent.
3. Fiber provides great immunity to crosstalk. With twisted pair copper local loops, crosstalk is always a factor to consider in link design. With fiber, crosstalk issues between different fibers are all but nonexistent. Light just does not couple between different fibers.
4. Fiber optic cables are very small allowing many to be packaged into a single, compact cable. In a multi-strand cable, the space taken up by a fiber is substantially less than that of a single copper local loop. Fiber optic cables are smaller but carry much more information than twisted pair copper cables used in the local loop.
5. Fiber is a very low loss medium. Optical splitters and cost effective transceivers can be used in fiber access networks because of the low losses of fiber. Splitters introduce a high level of attenuation that can only be marginally improved, and a typical 32x splitter introduces 16-17 dB of loss (15 dB of loss is a perfect 32x splitter). This is more than half of the typical link budget in a PON system. If fiber attenuation was considerably higher at the wavelengths used in local loop systems, then the cost of the necessary components would make implementing PON systems impractical.

© 2010, The Product Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Related posts:

1. Fiber in Broadband Access Networks
2. 10G GPON Tutorial
3. Fiber to the Node (FTTN) Overview

Broadband is Important, but Content is King

Good content is precious on the Internet, and access is, unfortunately, largely a commodity. But what I suspect these carriers are missing is that, without Net Neutrality regulated by an organization like the FCC, the quality content providers (whose networks and servers are an integral part of the Internet) could discriminate just like the broadband access providers. And it does not matter whether Net Neutrality regulation directly affects content providers, because the content providers could own, influence, or select their own access networks to discriminate. I suspect regulation could address this somehow.

Note that there is nothing fundamentally different about what the large content providers do and what any Internet user does at home. The difference is really just a matter of degree (admittedly a rather large difference in degree, but still one of degree and not fundamentally different). Both can act as sources and sinks for information.

With competition, subscribers have a choice. Without Net Neutrality regulations, broadband subscribers may be forced to choose their service provider based on content. Many would rather have 1 Mbps broadband service and unfettered access to all content than 100 Mbps service without this.

An Analogy

I have yet to run across a good analogy for discrimination on the Internet, so I came up with my own. Words are clumsy here, so the diagram below represents how an access provider and a content provider could discriminate.

Note that there are two access networks involved, and rarely would the content provider and the broadband subscriber be on the same access network. If one access provider can discriminate, then so can the other. Who does this hurt more? Obviously, Carrier A has the most to lose. If a broadband subscriber highly values a content provider (e.g., Facebook for which there is no direct substitute), this subscriber will change broadband access provider and drag along the entire triple or quadruple play of services.

FCC Regulations Will Benefit Carriers

Broadband access carriers should not dread FCC regulation that enforces Net Neutrality. These carriers have much to gain from free access to everything on the Internet.

© 2009, The Product Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Related posts:

1. Insight on Net Neutrality
2. Fiber in Broadband Access Networks
3. “Enough” Broadband is Never Enough

The transceiver is generally the most expensive component used in FTTH Optical Line Terminals (OLTs) and Optical Network Terminals (ONTs). OneChip’s focus on high integration and low cost could have a significant impact on the economics of fiber access networks.

The diagram below shows how their PIC fits into their optical transceiver design.

According to OneChip, their technology has several advantages:

1) Low cost. Both high integration and no requirement for hermetic sealing reduce the cost of optical devices. OneChip’s technology has all optical components on one piece of InP. There are no contaminant-friendly gaps and, therefore, no need for hermetic sealing. Additionally, their single-growth process for PICs can provide high net yields, and high net yields reduce the average cost per usable optical device. Alternative processes for producing these optical devices require multiple growth steps, each of which reduces net yield.

2) High performance.  Their Optically Pre-Amplified Detector (OPAD) receiver has a higher gain-bandwidth and lower cost than Avalanche Photodiodes (APDs), which also require an external high-voltage power supply; OPADs do not. Like many alternatives, OneChip’s transceivers use Distributed FeedBack (DFB) lasers, which are higher performance than Fabry-Perot (FP) lasers for fiber optic applications.

3) Reliability. On OneChip’s PIC, all optical components are part of the same piece of material and aligned for life. These PICs are virtually impervious to vibrations, which can adversely affect other technologies like bulk optics and Planar Lightwave Circuit (PLC) optics.

OneChip’s first focus is on high volume, low cost Ethernet PON (EPON) transceivers. They are currently sampling EPON transceivers and plan to ship their first production units in 4Q09. OneChip is also developing OLT and ONU transceivers for Gigabit PON (GPON).

© 2009, The Product Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Related posts:

1. Vendors of GPON Optical Transceivers
2. 10G GPON Tutorial
3. Five Reasons for Local Loop Fiber

Because just about everyone had a phone, voice’s value has been its ubiquitous nature, and for the last 100 years or so it was the default means of contacting someone at a distance. Today, the Internet has seeped into virtually everyone’s life, and even my mother and my in-laws surf the web and use email. Over 2/3 of homes in the US have broadband access, and even more have some form of Internet access either through dial-up or smartphones. And with businesses, Internet access has been a staple for years, and many have migrated their phone systems to VoIP. Cisco has had great success selling VoIP phones and VoIP PBX systems to businesses large and small.

Those devices we strap to our hips and use for text, social media, email, and yes voice, are they really primarily phones anymore?  I use mine far more for Internet access than for voice, though I am not known to be especially chatty. Smartphones are becoming more and more popular, and I suspect that many people use their smartphones similarly to the way I use mine. Voice over IP (implemented as SIP, MGCP, or H.248)  is even becoming common on these devices with support for Skype and Google Voice VoIP applications.

Because people use its data capabilities so much, the iPhone is giving AT&T broadband wireless network fits. I suspect AT&T thought they were selling phones (it is called the iPHONE) to people, not IP data terminals. The super-sizing of the iPhone screen should have been a dead giveaway. Those flashy screens are surely not to improve voice communications. They are, of course, for displaying documents and pages sent over the Internet and for typing in messages.

Because we tend to gravitate to those communications methods that require the least energy, computer-based communications like email, text, and Twitter have trumped voice and paper. We send email instead of snail mail (when was the last time you wrote a letter?). We text someone rather than call them, and ironically the text message is often delivered to something called a “cellular telephone”. We send an attachment rather than printing it out and mailing or faxing it.

Interactive video is the worst energy drain and is almost completely a non-starter. We love to see the other person while they talk. We hate for someone else to see us, and that asymmetry is the sting of death for video “telephony”. Why would you ever want to have to dress and comb your hair just to let your plumber know your toilet is leaking?  Sure, video could be useful for a job interview, but how often is that necessary?

Interactive voice is the next most expensive in terms of energy requirements. I can send probably ten meaty emails with the same energy required for a single ten minute conversation with someone. And on Twitter, I can send a message that will be read by hundreds with about 10 seconds of effort. No way voice can compete with that, though it definitely has its place.

When I do have to talk to someone, I use Skype’s VoIP service to communicate through my computer, and I prefer their VoIP network for voice to anything else I use for this purpose. The voice quality is better, I can talk just about anywhere in the world for free, and I can combine talking with text and other electronic methods of communications. Voice is an important part of my use of Skype’s network, but it is not the primary reason Skype is so attractive to me.

Ironically, all these new digital communications methods are faulted for taking up too much of our lives. The reality is that they are much better at leveraging our time and energy, and this is the driver for their victory over voice. Workers may claim that smartphones and email are consuming their work lives. However, without email and other electronic communications, many workers would be much less valuable and therefore paid less. Few workers would trade in their Blackberry for reduced compensation.

© 2009, The Product Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Related posts:

1. An Update on the Negroponte Flip
2. Is Latency the Bane of Broadband?
3. Wireline Will Survive Wireless Onslaught

The Internet doesn’t do much more than get information from one place to another anywhere in the world (and eventually beyond). But that is exactly what it was intended to do, and it does this very well and very cheaply. It is a basic communication medium that transports data packets (called IP datagrams. think of a mail envelope) virtually anywhere anyone cares to communicate. See image below for a representative interaction on the Internet.

Click to enlarge

Less Really is More

Sometimes less really is more when it comes to the Internet. I have watched the Internet grow from its humble beginnings to the juggernaut it is today, and at many points along the way, it grew at truly stupendous rates. This is the kind of growth rate that kills, but the Internet not only survived, but thrived. There were times when its infrastructure strained to handle the load, but by and large, it did an admirable job serving demands it was never remotely anticipated to serve.

What has enabled the Internet to grow so fast and well is its limited nature. The key factor allowing this kind of unbridled growth is not what the Internet attempts to accomplish, but what it does not do. The Internet provides a bare minimum set of functions that allow universal communications. Its transport of IP packets is best effort, latency is highly variable, and there is absolutely no guarantee of delivery. If data can get through, it will. And if it cannot, well then it won’t. No guarantees. But, virtually all of the time, the data does get through.

With the Internet, it is Bring Your Own Resources. The devices connected to the Internet provide most of the power needed to handle their applications. As they proliferate, the resources available for handling their applications increase at almost the same rate. The Internet does the absolute minimum necessary to allow devices all over the world to communicate, and everything else is handled by devices connecting to it. When it comes to building a worldwide public networking infrastructure like the Internet, less really is more.

Stateless Networking

What was the one factor most responsible for allowing the Internet’s rapid growth over the last 15 years?  This is the one thing that, if not true, would have fundamentally changed the success of the Internet. I say it is the fact that the Internet itself maintains no state information for user connections; they are stateless, meaning that every IP packet transported between a client and a server is handled individually and has nothing to do with any that preceded it and no effect on those that follow it.

Click to enlarge

The Internet knows only that a particular IP datagram has to go from here to there and not much else (see diagram above). Connections exist only as associations in the client and server to each other. Interestingly, the simplest, cheapest router on the Internet can route millions of connections because it is totally, completely, and utterly unaware of these. It is occupied only with forwarding each data packet individually.

Best Effort Delivery

As in life in general, there are no guarantees on the Internet. Your data may take 20ms to reach its destination (that is very fast), or it may take 200ms or 2000ms, or it may never arrive at all, but that is all par for the course. The protocols and applications on the Internet must deal with this variance and non-delivery to provide a useful service. In some cases, the Internet is not perfectly suited to an application (say interactive voice telephony), but since it costs so little, people will still use it for this purpose.

The Internet is often criticized for not providing Quality of Service (QoS). Since the Internet only provides best effort delivery, it does not maintain Quality of Service (QoS) information for connections or really any information about connections at all. QoS is one form of state information, and for a router to guarantee QoS, it must track connections and refuse connections after a certain point. This dramatically decreases the scalability of a router. Although not suited to a public network like the Internet, QoS can be useful in enterprise networks where the entire network is under one organization’s complete control.

Lack of QoS allows the Internet to gracefully degrade, slowing down but not completely stopping when a portion of it is overloaded. If connections required reservation of resources, when those resources ran out, new connections would be refused. This rather undemocratic method, of course, has tremendous potential for abuse.

The Stateless Web

Web browsing is largely a stateless activity. When a web browser requests a web page, the server delivers all the files required to render the page, largely forgets what just happened, and then moves on to serve other users. Because servers can forget clients once served, they can easily serve many thousands of users every day and many users at once.

Cookies are the mechanism whereby some limited state information is maintained in web clients. The web client is responsible for storing all state information about interactions with a particular web server. As web clients proliferate, so does the storage capacity of this state information.

In Closing

The brilliance of the Internet’s design lies in its simplicity. If it had incorporated even a small fraction of all the features people have said it needed, it would almost certainly have been a failure. It would never have become the universal medium it is today. The Internet has succeeded largely because of what it has not attempted to do.

© 2009, The Product Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Related posts:

1. Broadband Internet Can be Deadly
2. An Update on the Negroponte Flip
3. UK Internet Beats TV in Advertising Revenue

I studied Electrical Engineering both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student. As an undergraduate, I took a class in solid state physics, and we studied things that, well, had to do with solid state physics. Anyway, one thing I do remember learning in the class is that light can act both as a particle and as a wave. This is one concept I never understood at all until recently. It took 25 years for me to run across the explanation I needed to begin to understand this concept.

For some strange reason, I recently read every popular book I could find on astrophysics, relativity, quantum mechanics, and related concepts (yes, I am a geek). One thing I often encountered in my reading was the double slit experiment, which demonstrates the dual wave and particle natures of light and other quantum (very small) particles.

In this well-known experiment, quantum particles (electrons are often used, but photons achieve the same result) are emitted at two slits in an otherwise impervious plate, and the particles that pass through the slits are recorded on a screen beyond the plate. If one slit is covered, a particular pattern of particle impacts is recorded on the screen. If the other slit is covered, again a particular pattern of impacts is recorded on the screen but offset from the first results. All is as expected. See below for a double slit plate typical of those used in this experiment.

Image from WikiMedia Commons.

However, and this is where it gets interesting, when both slits are open, and particles pass through both slits, the pattern on the screen beyond the slits is an interference pattern (wait a minute), and not just the summation of the results of each single slit experiment. An interference pattern is generated when two waves interact. So, now the quantum particles are acting in some way like waves (tricky little buggers) and interfering with each other.

But wait, there is more. If particles are emitted one at a time at two open slits (someone developed an emitter that emits electrons one at a time), the interference pattern is still generated. What this very strange result means is that a particle must in some way be interfering with itself. Each electron passes through one and only one slit, but apparently that electron’s probability wave simultaneously passes through both slits, ultimately affecting where that electron lands on the screen.

Image from WikiMedia Commons.

See above (click to enlarge) for time lapse images of a screen used in a double slit experiment utilizing a one-at-a-time electron emitter. Image “e” clearly shows an interference pattern. Note that each electron still arrives at a single point on the screen.

Hitachi provides a description of their version of the double slit experiment as well as a video showing their results.

Wikipedia has a rather extensive article on this subject.

And finally, for a really clear explanation of the double slit experiment, watch the following video. It is pretty good until the last minute or so. Ignore the “act of measuring” effect, as this has been largely disproved.

© 2009, The Product Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Related posts:

1. Light Peak Revealed

The Internet was not designed for low latency transmission, so reducing latency to better serve interactive communications is quite difficult. With the current architecture of the Internet, some factors cannot be improved as they require changes to the laws of physics. No one will increase the speed of light, and the speed of light is rather slow when packets are routed around the world to serve a request. A single trip from the east coast to the west coast of the US requires about 25 ms just owing to the speed of propagation (about 2/3 the speed of light in a vacuum for transmission of electrical signals in copper, faster in fiber), and there is nothing that can be done to significantly reduce this. Other factors can be improved, but there is certainly a limit.

Latency’s effects depend on the application. These are discussed below by application.

Broadcast Media

Network latency has very little effect on broadcast communications. Examples of broadcast communications include watching video on YouTube and Hulu, listening to a podcast, or watching a recorded slide presentation. There is no interaction between the originator of the content and the user of the content, so if the content delivery is delayed by even a second or so, there will be little effect on the value of the communications.

Where latency can be a problem for broadcasting is in its variance, a value known as jitter . To compensate for changing latencies, a client receiving the broadcast stream will buffer the arriving packets and then steadily feed them to the user. However, if the jitter buffer is too small, and the latency variation is larger than the buffer’s capacity, then the user experience will suffer from jerky video and/or stuttering audio. The jitter buffer must be as least as large as the largest variance in delay experienced by a connection. Ultimately, the size of the jitter buffer is just an educated guess. Latencies can increase suddenly, and occasional problems are possible.

Interactive Media

Latency adversely affects interactive communications, both audio and video communications. Quality interactive Voice over IP (VoIP) communications requires low latency, and for the latency to be undetectable, it needs to be less than 50 ms. With higher latencies, interactive conversation with VoIP is difficult because a user has a hard time determining when to start talking. Arguing or having a heated discussion with someone is almost impossible. One party begins talking without realizing that the other party is also talking, so the two talk over one another and have to restart. Skype is a common interactive voice application used on the Internet.

Interactive video has even higher requirements for low latency. For someone to appear as though they are truly listening, their visual and audio feedback (nodding, uh huh, etc.) needs to be immediate and certainly less than 50ms. Longer latencies make it impossible for someone to properly convey that they are listening, and video becomes a distraction and a hindrance rather than an enabler. Interactive video with audio has the same audio problems that voice-only communication does.

Surfing the web is another interactive broadband Internet experience that is adversely affected by latency. A single web page is typically composed of tens of different files that must all be downloaded to display a single page. Serially downloading these files, even across very fast broadband, can tax the patience of almost anyone. For example, NYTimes.com requires 87 files to fully display its home page. If roundtrip latency is 200ms, serially downloading the home page requires at least 17 seconds just for the roundtrip latency, and other factors will make an actual download of NYTimes.com take even longer. Many viewers are lost once a page load exceeds 10 seconds, so parallel downloads are used by web browsers to optimize the user experience.

File Downloads

File downloads are largely unaffected by network latency owing to the windowing capability of TCP (the end-to-end layer four protocol that runs on top of IP). The most important factor is the TCP receive window size, which determines the amount of received data can be buffered in the client (typically a PC) before the sender (server) requires an acknowledgement to continue sending. By adjusting its receive window size, TCP allows the server to send packets to completely “fill the pipe” so that the it does not have to wait for acknowledgements from the client to continue sending.

For a server to use the entire bandwidth available, the client must have a receive window size equal to the bandwidth delay product. The bandwidth delay product is calculated as follows: (lowest link bandwidth on a connection) x (roundtrip delay). For a connection with the slowest link being a T1 (1.536 Mbps), and roundtrip delay of 200 ms, the bandwidth delay product is 307200 bits. The TCP window size on the connection must be equal to at least (307200 bits) / (8 bits/byte) = 38400 bytes for the full 1.536 Mbps to be used for a single download, and this is well within TCP’s maximum receive window size of 64k bytes.

To get beyond the 64k byte limit, Vista supports a feature called TCP Window Scaling to efficiently handle higher latency and higher bandwidth connections (both affect the bandwidth delay product). With scaling, an option is sent in synchronize (SYN) segments during the TCP connection establishment process. The option scales the TCP receive window to support up to a quite large value of about one gigabyte.

XP’s handling of TCP’s receive window is rather crude, but Vista includes a feature called Receive Window Auto-Tuning that automatically optimizes TCP throughput, and it is especially effective on paths with a high bandwidth delay product. Receive Window Auto-Tuning measures the bandwidth delay product and the rate at which data is cleared from the receive buffer and then periodically adjusts the receive window size for optimum throughput. Windows XP is much less sophisticated and requires manual configuration of the receive window size, which applies identically to all connections. Vista’s Receive Window Auto-Tuning works on each connection separately, individually tuning the receive window for maximum throughput.

Supporting a maximum scaled receive window size of 16 megabytes, which is 256 times larger than TCP’s unscaled receive window, Vista will accept around 600 Mbps on a single TCP connection having a roundtrip delay of 200ms. This is well beyond the capabilities of most PCs to digest.

Testing Network Latency

The easiest way to measure latency is to use the ping command, which is a tool built into many operating systems like Windows and Linux to assist in network performance management. On Windows, bring up a command prompt window and just type “ping google.com” to try it out (Note that not all websites will respond. Google.com and Yahoo.com will both respond.). Windows will send out several pings and report on the latency for each (mostly network latency usually). The diagram below (click to enlarge) shows a representative path of a test with the ping utility from a residence to google.com and back. Note that every element in the connection contributes to latency.

On links, the contributors to latency are the serialization delay and transmission delay. Serialization delay is the time required for a link to assimilate a packet and depends on the speed of the link. Transmission delay has to do with the time required for bits to travel a link, which could be as much as 25 ms should the link cross the US or the Atlantic ocean. Transmission delay has nothing to do with the speed of the link. Additional delay is introduced in the various routers, in the server processing the request, and even some in the local PC.

Other options for latency testing include tools available from Speedguide.net and Pingdom.com. Speedguide.net offers a ping utility as well as a traceroute tool that allow you to monitor latency on the connection from their site to your PC or any IP address. Their tools allow more net latency testing options beyond just the latency from your PC to a server on the Internet.

Pingdom.com provides a good test of website latency, and its tool also shows all the files downloaded to display a page. In web page response time, the number of files is more important than the size of the files unless they are unreasonably large; browsers are limited in the number of files they will download at one time. A web page requiring 40 files, and accessed with a browser supporting only 4 file downloads at a time, may require 10 separate sets of downloads to render a page. Note that many web pages are viewable well before all the data describing it is delivered to the client PC, and this reduces the problem.

To Sum Up

No, network latency is not the bane of broadband, but it is the adverse factor of broadband performance that is by far the most difficult to improve. In the coming years, we will have hundreds of megabits per second of broadband delivered to our homes, but the latency of our connections likely will not improve much at all. The Internet was originally designed to carry non-real time data traffic, and it has done a fine job of that along with many other things it was never designed to do. Without radical changes to the Internet’s architecture, interactive communications will forever suffer from the latency inherent in the current design of the broadband Internet.

For more, see this ACM article, Latency Lags Bandwidth (registration required), and this GigaOM article, Pain at the Pipe: Latency Matters.

© 2009, The Product Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Related posts:

1. Wireless Broadband the Stimulus Winner?
2. The Death of Telephony
3. “Enough” Broadband is Never Enough

The vast majority of all online marketing and advertising in the UK was for search advertising on search engine sites like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. The most rapid growth, over 300% year over year, was in video advertising, though the total for video ads was rather small at £12M. Presumably this video advertising came directly at the expense of TV advertising. Online classified ads grew briskly while banner adverts faded a bit with a decline of around 5% over the year.

TV is not as big in the United Kingdom, and it is more regulated there, so it is not surprising that this switch occurred first in the UK and not in the US.  However, it is probably only a matter of time before the same happens in the United States. IDC and Yankee Group are both predicting web advertising revenues in the US above $50B by the year 2012.

One interesting question today is, “Where does TV end and the Web begin?” Much of the activity on the Web today could be easily classified as “watching TV”, especially what goes on with YouTube and Hulu. New TVs are even getting into the game by satisfying people’s desire to watch Web video content on their television sets. The clear delineation between what is TV and what is video on the Web is rapidly disappearing. Video can be watched on the Web, and the Web can be viewed on television sets.

For more about online advertising revenue in the UK, visit The Guardian.

© 2009, The Product Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Related posts:

1. Broadband Beat Wednesday 9/30/09
2. Broadband Internet Can be Deadly
3. State of The Broadband Internet

The Washington Post’s lead editorial is on Net Neutrality today. Not my position exactly, but interesting and well written.

Ok, let’s think.  What is a good analogy for the Internet and Net Neutrality.  How about the phone system? I know of no phone numbers I cannot call. My use of modems is unhindered as far as I know, not that I need one anymore. But, when I did need one, I could use it all I wanted. I have complete Net Neutrality on my phone lines. Should broadband be any different? What do you think? I think with social media sounding the alarm, and competitive pressure, all carriers (mobile, wireless broadband, FTTH, DSL, cable) will be forced to full Net Neutrality, or very close, so the arguments to the contrary may be wasted effort.

Footnote

When I stayed in a beach condo about 10 years ago and tried to use my laptop’s modem, it would disconnect after about a minute or so every single time it connected. The guy at the front desk said I could use his ISDN line because the phone lines were noisy (voice sounded fine to me) owing to the building being situated on an island (he did not realize I knew much more about telecom than he did). Hmmm, sounds like they put some modem detector on the outgoing phone lines to keep their telephony costs down. What they did not realize is that this device was keeping their revenue down as well. I have never stayed there since.

© 2009, The Product Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Related posts:

1. Broadband Access Carriers Need Net Neutrality Too

Once an entire segment of cable is treated, the inner copper core is extracted with a winch, and fiber cables are pulled in behind the copper cables. The outer core of the copper cable becomes a duct for pulling the fiber optic cables. Kabel-X claims their longest cable pull so far is about 400 meters.   This animation from their website shows how their process works step-by-step.

Their technology appears to be  best suited for urban areas. In urban areas, manholes offer access to cables every couple of hundred meters or so, and avoiding digging and the resulting traffic issues are high priorities for most carrier installation crews.

Kabel-X claims their technology is faster, cleaner, and more cost-effective. It is faster because a Kabel-X technician can remove and replace cables faster than another technician can drill or dig and lay fiber cable. It is cleaner because much less or no digging is required, and traffic congestion from construction is almost entirely avoided. And they claim it is more cost effective. Their process avoids all the drilling and trenching required with traditional fiber installation processes, and the extracted copper cables can be resold, something not easily accomplished with alternative methods.

Kabel-X is used mostly in Europe, although their technology has been used in pilot trials in New Orleans, LA and at several sites in Africa and SE Asia. They claim thousands of km of cable have been replaced with their technology so far. Some of the carriers that have used this technology include BT, Austria Telekom, Deutsche Telkom, Swisscom, France Telecom, Telecom Malaysia, and Telkom South Africa.

© 2009, The Product Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Related posts:

1. Five Reasons for Local Loop Fiber
2. Broadband Can Reshape US Population