FiOS Fuels FTTH - But Where's Everyone Else? TelecomWeb The United States now ranks second in the world in fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) deployments - trailing only Japan - thanks almost entirely to Verizon and its FiOS project, according to new numbers compiled by research house Ovum-RHK.
Outside of Verizon's customers, only a paltry 8,000 new FTTH subscribers were signed up in all of the United States in the second quarter of this year. There were 463,000 FTTH subscribers in the U.S. by the end of the second quarter, Ovum says in its report, up 34 percent compared with the first quarter and up 66 percent compared with the fourth quarter of 2005. Still, the United States remains in a very distant second place compared with Japan that, at the end of the first quarter, reported more than 5.4 million FTTH subscribers. That 34-percent U.S. increase represents 118,000 subscribers, of whom 110,000 were FiOS subscriber additions. According to Ovum, Verizon now accounts for 81 percent of all the FTTH subscribers in this country. The remaining 19 percent are represented by a melange of companies including AT&T, Qwest, some CLECs, independent operating companies and municipalities, the report says. Ovum singled out Qwest as having the lowest level of FTTH activity among the ILECs. The U.K. researcher defines FTTH as fiber that connects directly to a home "without a DSL or LAN connection in between." That eliminates fiber-to-the-node, which includes the majority of what AT&T and BellSouth are doing, where the last-mile delivery is typically a variant of DSL. It also eliminates Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) where the fiber typically doesn't go already to the user. Ovum doesn't estimate how much better U.S. broadband deployment might or might not look if all of these types of fiber deployments are counted. Ovum also notes that the number of U.S. cities or communities with FTTH now tops 900, with 730 of those being FiOS communities. "Solid demand for advanced broadband services like the triple play continues to drive the need for more bandwidth and an infrastructure that can adequately accommodate those services," says Ken Twist, vice president of the Technology Consulting and Broadband Network Strategies groups at Ovum-RHK. "In the near term, Verizon will continue to drive the FTTH market." --------------------------------------------------------------------- Duane Whittingham (N9SSN) - Producer Tom and Darryl Radio Shows Heard on C-Band Analog Satellite (W0KIE) - Telstar 6 (IA6) Ch 1 6.2/6.8 mHz Also on WTND-LP Macomb 106.3 FM, WQNA 88.3 FM, WBCQ 7415 kHz & the Internet. Heard Fridays 9pm ET, Sundays 12am ET and Tues 2am ET (Folk) An Independent Freeform Eclectic Radio Show. http://www.tomanddarryl.org http://www.wtnd.us Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _____________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
