Cable Operators Upping the Ante with Fiber

By Michelle Pasquerello

TMCnet Associate Editor

 

For cable operators, fiber-to-the-home may be the answer to build upon and extend their core networks, allowing them to offer more services in a competition-heavy market with other telco companies.

 

Fiber-to-the-home, or FTTP (fiber-to-the-premises) employs powered electronic equipment in neighborhoods which performs layer 2/layer 3 switching and routing, passing on layer 3 routing to a carrier's central office. According to ABI Research, smaller operators with fewer homes to reach are choosing the FTTP path, making “the best economic sense in new developments under construction where they would be constructing a coaxial network anyway, rather than in trying to retrofit older neighborhoods.”

 

"On-demand environments for cable TV networks are not particularly robust compared to what the telecom operators can roll out," said Michael Arden, principal broadband analyst at ABI Research in a statement. "Looking to the future, some cable companies see fiber as a means to offer advanced video services that they are hard-pressed to provide today."

 

Cable operators in the US and parts of Canada, Western Europe, Japan already have fiber-rich core networks, with Verizon FiOS as the only RBOC in the US that has deployed FTTP on a large scale.