[opendtv] Re: FCC cracking down on misleading advertised broadband speeds

  • From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:18:04 -0500

Craig Birkmaier wrote:

> Then again, the average MVPD customer is consuming at least this much
> bandwidth today, albeit via a very broad band infrastructure (500 MHz
> of the same stuff to every home).
>
> Looks more like a change in topology than a significant difference in
> bandwidth...

And topology changes are cheap?

MVPDs, and this includes Verizon FiOS, use passive optical networks or passive 
coax networks, to reach individual homes. This plant is used to support TV 
broadcast channels, Internet unicast, and telephone unicast. A headend 
transmits downstream, and that signal is passively split through a series of 
optical splitters. All upstream traffic is also aggregated, and must reach the 
headend before going anywhere else. There are no active components in the 
middle of that cable plant. This is nothing like a typical switched Ethernet 
network you might see in an office complex.

For the Internet service, GPONs or GEPONs are the typical fast plant these 
days, since 2008. That's an aggregate 1 Gb/s downstream Internet service, 
passively split to reach all the homes in a neighborhood. This Internet service 
would typically use one of the wavelengths of the PON.

So, if 10 homes are each receiving 100 Mb/s of unicast traffic, that saturates 
the plant. When the ISPs install the GPON, even if they advertize 100 Mb/s 
service to high-paying households, they are banking on the fact that very few 
households will use that 100 Mb/s simultaneously, and certainly not 
continuously. This has always been the assumption in Internet provisioning.

Anytime now, 10GPONs will start being deployed. So now 100 homes would saturate 
the plant, if each were downloading at 100 Mb/s at the same time. And that's 
the fastest PON just starting to become available today.

So, either you create a denser topology, which is not free, or you increase the 
speed of each PON, which is also not free. It always involves labor on site. Of 
course the ISPs are going to be reluctant to do this, until it becomes 
inevitable. Just because the average joe doesn't witness all this work going 
on, or doesn't know that it costs money, doesn't mean these considerations 
don't matter.

Bottom line is, just because a fiber may be capable of very high bit rates, 
that doesn't mean that the network behind that spigot will support top speed to 
every household at the same time.

Bert
 
 
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