Why Carriers Are Transforming Copper to Fiber

Alchemists of the ancient world spent centuries searching for the philosopher’s stone. This is a legendary substance that could turn lead into gold. They never found it. Today’s network carriers may well have found a modern equivalent to the philosopher’s stone. It’s the near magic of converting copper into fiber.

Telecom service providers aren’t really after a chemical process to make them rich. They have something even more lucrative. Their version of transmutation involves the wholesale replacement of century old twisted pair copper wiring with the latest in multiple strand fiber optic cabling.

There are untold tons of copper in the ground. Not just the ore, mind you. The copper that makes money for carriers is the refined variety that is drawn into small diameter wire and coated with colored plastic for insulation. The wires are then joined into pairs so a complete circuit can be formed. They are twisted into a spiral to cancel out interfering signals from other pairs and outside influences such as AC power cabling. Collections of twisted pairs are bundled into cables called binders and then buried or flown overhead on utility poles.

The installed copper is referred to as an asset by the companies that own it. These are almost always the ILECs or Incumbent local Exchange Carriers. They are the legacy of the old Bell System that developed the technology and installed the infrastructure in the first place. Copper assets have been the basis of telecom profits for more than a century. So, why turn your back on this valuable resource?

Copper’s glory days are in the past. For more than a dozen decades, copper wires carried most voice and data signals. Data came first, in the form of the telegraph. Voice soon followed with the invention of Bell’s telephone. Even television used copper for signal transport, although using a different type of cable called coax. It’s still the most popular way to connect cable television to homes and businesses. What’s replacing copper? Fiber.

Fiber optic bundles long ago replaced copper cables as undersea cables. They also form the core of nationwide data networks and long distance telephone service. What’s left is the arduous job of abandoning or pulling out all that old copper still used locally and replacing it with the latest in high efficiency fiber optics.

Make no mistake, converting copper to fiber is an expensive process. Verizon has been a leader in FTTH (Fiber to the Home) using passive fiber optic cables to replace old telephone wires. Once installed, the fiber becomes the telecom connection to that location and the copper is decommissioned. Despite the advantages of fiber over copper, this conversion process has not spread like wildfire across the country. It costs a lot to install the new fiber and network interface boxes.

The buildout cost is becoming less of an issue all the time. This is especially true for the copper installations in business locations. Businesses are willing to spend a lot more in monthly lease fees for their bandwidth connections than consumers. They are also faced with the new reality that high bandwidth is critical for the growth of their businesses.

Business demand is one major impetus in the transformation of copper to fiber MAN and WAN connections. Bandwidth demands are skyrocketing and copper is limited in how much it can transport. T1 lines at 1.5 Mbps and DS3 connections at 45 Mbps are most popular legacy telecom services. DS3 itself depends on fiber optic transmission to the curb, where the final run into the building is accomplished with coaxial copper. T1 uses those twisted pairs originally installed for telephone service. It was specifically designed to be compatible. The good news is that T1 is almost universally available. The bad news is that it no longer has the bandwidth to support modern business processes. A couple of decades ago 1.5 Mbps was all you needed even in larger companies. Now that’s considered entry level at best.

A couple of technical advances are extending the life of the installed copper assets. One is T1 line bonding. You can connect two T1 lines so they act like one line with twice the capacity. Add more lines and multiply the bandwidth. The practical limit to this is 10 or 12 Mbps. Another technology is called Ethernet over Copper (EoC). This uses the same twisted pair copper as T1 but with a different modulation scheme that offers higher bandwidths but distance sensitivity. You can easily get 10 to 50 Mbps, but need to be fairly close to the telco CO for higher bandwidths.

What’s fiber got to offer? How about bandwidths from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps? Cloud computing, video, big data and content distribution need those higher bandwidths that only fiber can easily provide. This requirement is only going to increase in the future. This is why Verizon recently took advantage of the “opportunity” to replace their old copper with fiber in lower Manhattan following the water damage from Hurricane Sandy. It future-proofs their network while opening up a market for higher priced higher bandwidth services.

Is your business being stymied by too low bandwidth? Check availability of Ethernet over Copper and Fiber Optic services for your business location. You may be surprised by the increased availability and lower cost of higher bandwidth metro and WAN services.


Note: Photo of fiber optic conduit spools courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Fiber Optic Speeds Come to Cable

Cablevision systems Corp. is raising the bar on broadband Internet service by breaking the 100 Mbps speed limit over Cable TV service. They announced a rollout of the new high speed Internet service starting May 11. Sign up and you can get download speeds up to 101 Mbps with upload speed of up to 15 Mbps for around $100 a month.

But just a second. Isn't Cable TV still using regular old RG-6 coaxial cable? I thought you needed fiber optic cable to get those kind of speeds.

Oh, there's a lot more bandwidth capability in copper wire that you might suspect. It comes down to how efficiently you use the capability that exists. Even common twisted pair telephone wire is capable of transporting Mbps level signals up to several miles. The latest technology for last mile delivery of business grade bandwidth is EoC or Ethernet over Copper, which is able to provide up to 45 Mbps using multiple copper pair that most businesses already have installed.

The magic behind the Cablevision advance is called DOCSIS 3.0. DOCSIS is the standard for transporting broadband data on cable television systems. The acronym stands for Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification. If you have a cable modem, it's running one of the DOCSIS standards. What this standard does is define how to create data channels that fit into standard 6 MHz TV channels so that they will pass unhindered through cable equipment. The cable operator decides how many channels it needs to set aside to support the demand for cable modems.

The latest version, just coming into service now, is DOCSIS 3.0. This upgrade specifies bonding up to 10 NTSC TV channels of 6 MHz each to provide a bandwidth of 60 MHz. MHz and Mbps are not the same. With clever modulation schemes, you can get a lot more than 1 Mbps from a 1 MHz channel. The DOCSIS 3.0 standard offers cable operators 4 channel bonding for a maximum usable speed of 152 Mbps downstream and 108 Mbps upstream. The 8 channel bonded option gives a maximum usable speed of 304 Mbps downstream. That's lots of room for growth as demand increases.

What is driving the need for 100 Mbps Internet service? It's all about the video. With that amount of bandwidth, a user can download a full-length HDTV movie in less than 10 minutes. Make no mistake about it, HD video is a snowball that is starting to roll downhill. Internet service providers that get in its way with things like slow connections and bandwidth caps are going to get rolled over as the public embraces IP TV. Satellite and Cable operators would like to insist that they be the providers of all TV content on a subscription or pay per view basis. The public is having none of it. They're going to third party providers, such as Netflix, or going directly to TV network websites to get episodes of their favorite programs that they've missed. YouTube remains a popular destination for shorter video clips, but may well become a clearinghouse for full-length programs of all types.

How far will this go? Look for other cable companies to embrace DOCSIS 3.0 and match Cablevision's 100 Mbps speeds. I'd also expect the same from Verizon's FiOS, a fiber optic technology that has plenty of bandwidth available. Those silly bandwidth caps are going to disappear at least for high-end bandwidth users. Nobody is going to pay $100 or more a month for broadband and then be told they've used up their allotment by mid-month. That means cable companies sucking it up and installing faster Internet backbones and agreements with content delivery networks as well as boosting speeds to the users.

Cable vs FTTH Bandwidth Throwdown

The battle of the bandwidths has begun in earnest. In one corner, the presumed high speed champion, FTTH (Fiber to the Home). In the opposite corner, the challenger, Cable Broadband. Who will be champion? That's too early to tell. But we know who the real winner is going to be - bandwidth hungry broadband users.

The latest battleground is Washington state. Comcast, the Cable giant, is rolling out 50 Mbps Internet service to compete with Verizon, the telco giant, that offers 50 Mbps FiOS Internet service. FiOS is the name Verizon has given to its PON or Passive Optical Network system that connects homes and businesses to distribution hubs via fiber optic cable. The fiber and its splitters are passive, although you do need a rather large network interface box mounted outside to terminate the cable and convert the pulsating wavelength data back to electrical signals.

So what makes Comcast think that plain old copper coaxial TV cable can take on light powered optical fibers? DOCSIS 3.0, that's what. DOCSIS or Data Over Cable System Interface Specification is the cable modem standard that allows cable system operators to transport data along with TV signals. They do this by setting aside some TV channels for Internet service and using modulation technology to create signals that are compatible with cable channels. The modem takes care of making those signals Ethernet compatible.

From a users perspective, it doesn't matter if the incoming cable is fiber or copper as long as it can handle the needed bandwidth. Ultimately, the user is simply going to connect an RJ-45 plug in the back of whatever interface box is provided.

Just what bandwidth can you squeeze out of cable, anyway? Well, it's a far cry from analog telephone lines. We know how quickly our analog modems topped out at 56 Kbps. That's all there will ever be from that technology. A telephone voice channel just hasn't got any more room to grow. Telephone companies get around that by using frequencies beyond the voice range to deliver DSL over home and business phone lines. But there is a definite speed versus distance tradeoff that limits this technology.

No so much with Cable. Those TV channels can go and go and go. Most Cable companies now use fiber optic transmission for part of the distribution distance. They just haven't gone the extra step of bringing the fiber right to the building, like Verizon has done. For users lucky to get 3 to 6 Mbps on their Cable connections, 50 Mbps may seem a bit fanciful. But they're stuck using older DOCSIS standards that don't bond multiple channels together to create a pipe capable of as much as 400 Mbps.

Wow! Comcast is sitting on 400 Mbps? Well, not so fast. That's an upper limit and could require a huge investment of both equipment and set-aside channels. For now, Comcast is figuring their 50 Mbps "Extreme 50" service will be enough to compete with 50 Mbps FiOS.

We'll see how long that lasts. Verizon is already planning to up the ante to 100 Mbps in the near future.

One thing that doesn't seem to be mentioned in the news about these fantastic broadband speeds is download limits. There's been a lot of hoopla recently as Internet Service Providers, including Comcast, have announced caps on how much data you can download per month before getting kicked off the service. The providers say the limit is set high so that only network abusers will be affected. But that's with the modest bandwidths most of us have available. You have to spend a majority of your time in constant download mode to hit the limits.

What happens as bandwidths exceed 100 Mbps and full-length high definition video downloads become commonplace? Perhaps by then the carriers will have upgraded their network backbones and have auxiliary content delivery networks in place to handle the video load. They'll need to keep on this. After all, the way technology advances we'll be clamoring for Gbps broadband service sooner than any of us expect.

Is The World Going on a High Fiber Diet?

A recent research report shows that around the world, more people are now signing up for fiber optic Internet access than cable broadband. Yours is being installed next week, right?

Don't feel bad. The United States isn't exactly leading the charge in shunning copper in favor of fiber optic delivery. Certainly not in FTTH or fiber to the home service. Verizon's FiOS is about the only game going here. But in China, there are almost 17 million fiber optic service subscribers. We have about 2.6 million to put us in a solid fourth place behind Japan and Korea.

But wasn't satellite communications supposed to be the answer to unlimited worldwide communications? It was back when the space age began and twisted pair & coaxial copper cables were the only game in town. Or under the sea for that matter. Yes, there are low earth orbit (LEO) and geosynchronous satellite communications in place now and you can order satellite broadband any time you want. But it's still a specialized service almost 50 years after AT&T put the first Telstar satellite into orbit.

There are a couple of good reasons for this. Telstar service was only good for about 20 minutes at a time. Then you had to wait a couple of hours for it to come around again. To provide full-time communications, you need a constellation of LEO satellites like the ones used for GPS or Iridium service. With lots of satellites you could have the Internet overhead, but it's costly. Too costly for all those birds to get enough capacity for today's Internet usage.

The same thing is true for geosynchronous satellites, plus one other nagging problem. They're so far out in space that you lose a second or so between transmission, reception and confirmation among locations. That's latency and it's a killer for voice or other real-time two-way services. Latency is unimportant for one way communications such as satellite TV, where geosynchronous satellites have flourished.

Down here on Terra Firma and under the briny depths, it's copper, fiber or wireless. Nothing beats fiber for huge bandwidths at low latency. The fiber itself isn't all that costly, either. It's the installation. That drives most of the telcos nuts, since they spent the last 100 years burying copper. Now they have to go and do the job all over again.

Even so, fiber optic communications is not just the coming thing. It's the going thing right now. Nearly all nationwide and undersea communications is now on fiber. Competitive carriers are getting aggressive about building out points of presence (POPs) to serve business users who need and can afford fiber optic bandwidth levels.

Meanwhile copper is getting a second lease on life as an access technology for both residential and business users. Fiber is brought into the neighborhood and then delivered the last mile or two over conventional twisted pair copper wires. Cable broadband is headed for an upgrade to DOCSIS 3.0 to squeeze more bandwidth from coax as a delivery medium.

Meanwhile, the drumbeat of fiber optic Internet service grows louder and louder. It's just a matter of time now.

Broadband For The Home Office

With bandwidth choices multiplying, home office users are wondering what's the best deal for them. Should they go with garden variety residential DSL or Cable Internet service, the new FIOS service from Verizon, or something professional grade like Business DSL, T1, or Carrier Ethernet? Here's a quick guide to what's available and what makes sense for the home office user.

Most often, the best option for home office connections to the Internet are the "residential" broadband services. That's true for a couple of reasons. First of all, residential broadband is as low cost as you can get. It's generally only available in residential neighborhoods. The local cable company may well be selling broadband connections to restaurants and small offices in areas zoned for business, but they'll also be charging around double what you'll pay at home. It's likely to be the same or very similar connection quality, perhaps with special customer service attention for the higher paying business customers.

Beyond cost, the other reason residential broadband is a good match for home offices is that most home users are willing to live with occasional short outages and varying bandwidths in exchange for cost savings. If the line drops for 20 minutes, can you take a break and come back or do something offline? If so, you'll save a bundle. If you are using VoIP telephony, is the bandwidth high enough so that your phone calls sound decent and rarely drop? With one or two phones and a decent router that lets you set priority for voice packets, you may very well be able to use a single broadband connection for your broadband telephone and PC Internet.

So how do you find your best deal on residential broadband? The easiest is to use an online broadband search engine such as "Can I Get DSL?" You enter your name, email, and phone number and in a matter of a minute or two you get back a display of which broadband services are available for your location and their prices.

Notice that you need to enter you landline phone number for this to work. Search engines like this one use the phone number to establish your exact location based on phone company records. That's important because all broadband services are location sensitive. The house across the street may be wired for cable or fiber optic service, but yours isn't. Or vice versa. For DSL, it's even more critical. DSL uses high frequency signals that ride on the telephone line along with standard voice service. These signals have a very limited geographical reach from the phone company office. If you are more that a few thousand feet, it gets dicey. By the way, that applies to both residential and business DSL offerings. It's the technology that limits the distance.

OK, but what if you don't have a landline? Perhaps you use a cell phone exclusively or VoIP sharing your broadband connection. Or you are moving to a new location and want to find out what broadband services are available there. For DSL, forget it. It's rare to be able to get DSL without landline phone service. Both services use the same phone lines. Plus you need that phone number to even run a search. If you are using VoIP for phone calls, chances are that you are looking for Cable Internet anyway. To get an idea on service availability and prices, use a next door neighbor's landline number to run a search (with their permission of course). This won't guarantee availability, but is likely to give you an accurate picture of what services are available. You'll need to call your cable company or the cable company at your new location to actually establish service.

An exciting new service rolling out in selected parts of the country, mostly in the New York metroplex area, is Verizon FIOS. This is the long awaited FTTH or Fiber To The Home service. You can get download speeds up to 30 Mbps, plus telephone and television service, all delivered over fiber optic cable.

I should mention that the broadband search at Can I Get DSL? returns DSL, Cable, and Satellite Internet. Satellite is a viable alternative if you live in a rural area or part of town not served by DSL or Cable. It's more expensive than the other residential options and you have to pay a equipment fee, but it may well met your Internet needs when the other option is dial-up. Because of the time delay, called latency, involved in sending a signal up to a geosynchronous satellite and back down, this service isn't very usable for VoIP phone service. You might be able to make it function, but the conversations will be more like using walkie-talkie or CB radio than traditional telephone service.

Another option that may be available locally is wireless broadband. These are locally owned and have very limited coverage, so there's no search engine. Try the newspaper ads or Yellow Pages to see if there is a provider in your area. If so, you can often get service quality similar to Cable broadband at about the same cost. Sometimes there are wireless providers in smaller or more rural counties that aren't hooked up to Cable.

But what about the profesional grade telecom services? T1 is the defacto standard for many small business locations because it provides rock-solid bandwidth at 1.5 Mbps both upload and download, often with a service level agreement or availability guarantee. The reliability is at least an order of magnitude better than residential services, repair times are faster, and the provider may offer you a managed router so they can monitor your service quality at all times. For this, you pay about 10x the cost of residential broadband. In major cities, that's around $400 a month with a 1, 2, or 3 year lease require. In less built-up areas the cost is higher. There's also a rather stringent credit check.

For some people, T1 service to the home is worth the expense. These tend to be people with expensive residences and demanding professions that require top grade service, whatever the price. If you fall into that category, please let one of our professional consultants help you decide on the best professional grade services available for your location.

There is also Business DSL service, but this is also typically available only for business-zoned areas near telephone company central offices. It typically costs 2 to 3 times residential DSL and is characterized by symmetrical bandwidth. That means similar upload and download speeds. Once again, this service is distance limited by the technology involved. If you can't get residential DSL, you won't be able to get business DSL.

The other available business bandwidth solutions are more intended for medium to large companies. These include T3 or DS3 bandwidth at 45 Mbps and fiber optic Ethernet at 10 Mbps to 1 Gbps. Those services start around $2,000 a month, so it would be the rare home office user who can justify this expense.