Verizon Combining TV/Phone/Internet

by Conscious* » Mon Jul 04, 2005 5:25 pm

I was over my friends house this afternoon for a fourth of July party and his cousin who is 22 was in the Navy and was a System Software Coder/Hacker...He was telling me that Verizon is laying Fibercables to achieve download speeds of up to 10-20x faster then broadband upon its release date. He also told me that Verizon would be able to offer this at relatively the same price as comcast, and most likely even buying out comcast. Lastly he informed me that Verizon will combine TV, Internet and Phone lines through one fiberwire to your house, so you can pay for it all in one monthly bill. Anyone else heard anything like this.

by **BladeRunner** » Mon Jul 04, 2005 6:07 pm

I don't know about Verizon but my local utility company is
allready offering fiber to the home. very reasonable rates too.
Our tv signal, including HD channels, our telephone
service and our broadband is all fiber. the only wires to
my house is the electric power.
http://www.bvu-optinet.com/indexhtml.htm

by **cavalierlwt** » Mon Jul 04, 2005 6:13 pm

Well, big subject really.
I used to work for Worldcom, as a field engineer for their fiber optic network.
There is actually *TONS* of fiber laid in the ground and there is massive, I mean MASSIVE amounts of bandwidth available from city to city, from city to substation or CLEC (Carrier Local Exchanges).
A very small percentage of the fiber is actually being used.
The problem is 'The Last Mile' problem. Very few homes actually have a fiber running to them. Some communities have taken matter into their own hands and started projects to run a fiber to every home, or to every new home.
That is the only thing standing between you and massive bandwidth. Every year the equipment gets cheaper, and the amount of data you can put on a single fiber goes up. When I left in 2002 it was routine to put 4 or 5 OC-192 (each OC192 is almost 10 Gbits per second) using something called DWDM (dense wave division multiplexing). We had even put up a few Terrabit systems, equal to four OC-192s, but as of then, putting other stuff on the same fiber as the terrabit system was a little tricky.

The problem with getting fiber to the curb is cost: who's going to pay, who's going to make the money off of it. Deregulation actually hurts us in this respect, because there's always the chance that if a company spends the money and takes the risk of laying in the fiber to the homes, anti-monopoly laws may force that company to turn around and lease those lines to it's competition for little or no profit. This of course drives prices down, along with profit. So, whats the incentive for a company to take a risk and incur those costs? This is where it's helpful for the town itself to step in and take some action. The one other barrier to this is the amount of available revenue. No matter how much bandwidth they give you, the average household is only going to cough up 40-60 bucks a month. So, there's not much point in spending $10,000 to fiber up a house just to get $700 a year revenue, and even less profit, from it yearly.

Once that fiber is running from your home to your local substation though, boom, the sky is the limit. Your ping would be single digits to most places.

Either way, I think you'll see broadband speeds continue to rise, and somehow someway, fiber to the home will become more frequent.

by **cavalierlwt** » Mon Jul 04, 2005 6:16 pm

Originally posted by BladeRunner
I don't know about Verizon but my local utility company is
allready offering fiber to the home. very reasonable rates too.
Our tv signal, including HD channels, our telephone
service and our broadband is all fiber. the only wires to
my house is the electric power.
http://www.bvu-optinet.com/indexhtml.htm

Sweet!
What's your town like? Big, small, etc
There isn't even talk of fiber to the curb in NH so far.
I just checked out the webpage. The speed is pretty low for fiber, but I would imagine someday soon you'll get big, big boost in speed. I was surprised to see the asymetric upload/download speed too. Almost seems like they are still stuck with copper somewhere along the line. What is your ping like to ECGN servers?

by **BladeRunner** » Mon Jul 04, 2005 6:50 pm

Small city compared to other cities, around 45,000 i think.
http://www.bristolva.org/SpanglerDirectory.htm

I'm not sure about the details of the fiber but there should
not be any copper. they only started offering tv,internet,
phone service after the fiber system was put in.

I think my ping is around 37 to 40 (very steady no spikes
except when my kids or wife use the other computers in the
house)
i'm only around 330 miles from the server but tracroute
wise the bvu optinet goes to sprint then routed to Atlanta, GA.
then to ECGN. if it wasn't for the sprint routing i'm sure
my ping would be better.
:beer:

by Conscious* » Tue Jul 05, 2005 12:06 am

Originally posted by BladeRunner
Small city compared to other cities, around 45,000 i think.
http://www.bristolva.org/SpanglerDirectory.htm

I'm not sure about the details of the fiber but there should
not be any copper. they only started offering tv,internet,
phone service after the fiber system was put in.

I think my ping is around 37 to 40 (very steady no spikes
except when my kids or wife use the other computers in the
house)
i'm only around 330 miles from the server but tracroute
wise the bvu optinet goes to sprint then routed to Atlanta, GA.
then to ECGN. if it wasn't for the sprint routing i'm sure
my ping would be better.

You shouldn't have any lag and you should ping about 5 to ECGN servers even when your kids are on if you have fiber-optic connections...Am i right?

by **BladeRunner** » Tue Jul 05, 2005 5:20 am

I wish I did get only a 5 ping but I don't.
here view of my routing, i thought bvu was using sprint but
from these routes it looks like AT&T.
even though its fiber all the way we still use the telephone
company just like cable companys use.

by **BladeRunner** » Tue Jul 05, 2005 6:49 am

here is another trace, this one from my work place (they
also use BVUnet).
as far as lag when others are using our shared home network.
I think because i am capped at 1 meg download speeds.
normal surfing i don't think effects it but if they start
downloading music or files i see a slight studder in my
game. i'm not positive of this but i do seem to see a
few studders when they are downloading.

by **Namloot** » Tue Jul 05, 2005 3:14 pm

Verizon is installing fiber in my town. As soon as it's available, I am going to check it out. This could be a wonderful thing.

by **LordShard** » Tue Jul 05, 2005 3:19 pm

Originally posted by ConScIouS
You shouldn't have any lag and you should ping about 5 to ECGN servers even when your kids are on if you have fiber-optic connections...Am i right?

Light and electricity move at the same speed. What causes lag is repeaters , routers, bridges, switches, ect.

Fiber optics uses less repeaters, so less lag there. but that is the only quality I know of that would make less lag.

by **ShipWreck** » Tue Jul 05, 2005 3:40 pm

Would be nice just to have braodband where I live. Instead of staying after work to play. Makes it a long ass day.

by **cavalierlwt** » Tue Jul 05, 2005 4:56 pm

One thing that causes big lag (39) is going from SONET (fiber) which is synchronous to copper and demuxing back into asynchronous, which is what I think is happening. He has fiber going to his house, which is great, but somewhere along the line they are breaking the synchronous optical signal down, demuxing it asynchronous, then muxing back up into synchronous again to send it to his house. If they switch to all optical switching/routing, he should drop to single digits on the ping. It's probably just a matter of them using some legacy equipment for the routing.

Actually, I just looked at his routing table, he getting sent all over the place, that's causing his ping to get up to 39. Nothing much to do there. Oh well, 39 is decent ping.

As far as his bandwidth though, he will eventually get a huge boost in speed as the company updates its equipment. That's the great thing about fiber, the same fiber is capable of carrying as little as OC-1 or OC-3, or as much as OC192 or even Terabit systems. The only equipment change is at the substation. Makes for easy upgrades to speeds and services as they evolve.

by **BladeRunner** » Tue Jul 05, 2005 5:42 pm

more info on FTTH (fiber to the home)
who has it, who is getting it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTTH
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fios
:beer:

by Conscious* » Tue Jul 05, 2005 6:02 pm

Originally posted by cavalierlwt
One thing that causes big lag (39) is going from SONET (fiber) which is synchronous to copper and demuxing back into asynchronous, which is what I think is happening. He has fiber going to his house, which is great, but somewhere along the line they are breaking the synchronous optical signal down, demuxing it asynchronous, then muxing back up into synchronous again to send it to his house. If they switch to all optical switching/routing, he should drop to single digits on the ping. It's probably just a matter of them using some legacy equipment for the routing.

In English!

by **BladeRunner** » Tue Jul 05, 2005 7:10 pm

cavalierlwt might can make some sense out this.
here is the type system they are using here in Bristol:
http://www.alcatel.com/doctypes/opgproductbrochure/pdfa4/7340_FTTU_A4_bro.pdf#search=

Verizon Combining TV/Phone/Internet

Verizon Combining TV/Phone/Internet

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