[CAnet - news] Thesis of US cable specialist: "FttH at the end of this decade"

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[Thanks once again to Dirk van der Woude for this pointer -- BSA]



H. Mark Bowers is heavily specialized in cable networks and a vice-president

of Cablesoft Inc. (Iowa, US).

He also went back to university, please see his recent thesis "Assessing the

Evolutionary State Of the Modern U.S. Cable Television 
Network Towards An All-Digital Platform"
(open source: http://www.cablesofteng.com/MOT690.pdf)

He is freely discussing tehnical possibilities and limitations of coax and 
FttH, succeeds however stay quite readable.

On page 129 - 130 he get to his conclusions, partly copied in below. 

(NB: you might want to read a bit more of those conclusions, including 
the part where the competing telco's are described) 

===============================

CONCLUSIONS 
Despite HFC's present strengths and adaptability, HFC architecture 
will eventually be forced towards something 'similar' to FTTH with an all
Internet protocol delivery method, simply because escalating
bandwidth/data throughput requirements and headend/regional
interconnect cost and complexity will leave little choice. 

While the Chapter 4 bandwidth demand analysis demonstrates that HFC 
architecture should remain adequate through this decade, the research 
also demonstrates that node sizes will have to be taken ever smaller to 
keep up with consumer bandwidth demands, implying a point will be 
reached when fiber optics directly to the customer just 'makes the most 
sense'. 

Node sizes of around 25 to 50 homes may well trigger new approaches 
in network architecture for the cable industry.
(NB: the author thinks this will be within the next 4 years)


In summary, the writer concludes that the bulk of research indicates
the most efficient future network is FTTH combined with Internet Protocol. 

There is no doubt that improvements in the HFC network will continue to
be made over this decade to obtain better bandwidth utilization and 
flexibility, however, in the researchers opinion FTTH is inevitable for the
following reasons."



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