Re: Summary of BroadBand on Fibre,,
>ignoring the cost of terminal equipment.
and ignoring the cost of splicing, polishing and attaching a connector to the fibre...
I remember there being several UK businesses back in the mid 80's doing very nicely out of this, with prices in the several hundreds of GBP's per attached connector...
It surprised me how plastic fibre didn't take off, as in the sub 1km space there was no performance difference, plus making a reliable termination was a job any competent technician could perform.
>What was the blatantly obvious use case for FTTP 42 years ago in 1974?
Agree, I would like to know, it was difficult enough in the late 1980's creating a credible use case for the use of fibre in the data centre, where FDDI ring was trying to gain traction. Yes there was a "blatantly obvious use case" for the use of point-to-point fibre in the telco backbone; where costs were less of an issue, but in the consumer market, before the advent of microcomputers and the modern connected society paradigm?
In some respects we should be grateful that we didn't deploy FTTP back in the 1970's. You only need to look at the Milton Keynes cable tv infrastructure to see the problem: the network was designed and built for broadcast, ie. transmit only, thus it used thousands of splitters at around 50p each that were undirectional, because they were significantly cheaper than bidirectional splitters. In the late 1980's when the idea of residential data comm's was starting up, the costs to upgrade the infrastructure ie. replace all the splitters, was astronomical. So yes we might have had FTTP, but we would still running projects similar to BDUK and FTTC as we tried to upgrade this cable infrastructure to support modern speeds and usage patterns.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
