September 27th, 2006
Report: Verizon FIOS 12-18 months away from set-top delivery of ALL Internet videos
In a private note to several of his colleagues (including your truly) Dave Burstein of DSL Prime reports this morning he has found out that Verizon is about 12 to 18 months away from executing a plan to open the set-top box to all Internet video. This woud be done by means of Verizon FIOS, their broadband video service.
And by all Internet video, not just the video content provided by Verizon content partners, but all of it.
"If they follow through, they will have accepted the most important issue in net neutrality - honest consumer access to content of her choice."
The key to this is an understanding of GPON and BPON’S capabilities.
Not gonna leave you swimmin’ in the alphabet soup. GPON- Gigabit Passive Optical Network. BPON- Broadband Passive Optical Network.
"GPON can go 250 down, 125 up. Soon to start early trials, Verizon will continue using another wavelength just for video," Dave writes. "They (Verizon) probably won’t offer those speeds at the beginning, but the folks involved are confident it will be reliable. Dynamic bandwidth allocation means the 2.4 gig down, 1.2 gig up is effectively shared, so that 99+% percent of the time any user needing speeds in the hundreds of megabits can access them."
Interoperability issues that will make this ubiquitous are being worked on with much progress, Dave intimates.
"BPON can raise speeds to 100 down, 30 up using similar techniques bandwidth sharing techniques. Until recently, effectively shared This is important because Verizon will have deployed between 7M and 9M lines of BPON before they have enough confidence to switch over to GPON," he writes
So how fast is BPON?
Dave lets us know it is 622 down, 155 up, split up to 32 ways. "That’s considerably better than the low end DOCSIS 3.0 (160/120)," he writes, "and similar to the high end DOCSIS 3.0 (1 gig/100 meg, shared to probably hundreds of homes.)
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
