Fiber to the home: practically a reality

Fiber to the home positions the telephone network to deliver services beyond telephony. The author suggests that the greatest potential lies in next-generation video-large screens, high definition, narrowcasting and flexible billing. Broadband access combined with end-to-end signaling makes the telephone network attractive for delivering these services. The key to positioning the network for video is to place fiber for passive optical telephone systems (POTS) and later upgrade it. Although the choice of architecture is fundamental to this strategy, the gating factors will be operational: splicing, patching, fault isolation. Early field experience with a first application delivering POTS, CATV, and ISDN is described