Of course, what the paper seems to have missed and Löthberg failed to mention was there is around upwards of at least $250,000 in hardware sitting in his Mum's home to terminate the 40 Gbps circuit, including a backbone grade CRS-1
. That's not exactly peanuts. Or was it a $250,000 optical line card? I'm not a big Cisco guy these days, but it's some gobsmacking expensive gear that you can't buy at the Big Box store, much less get a decent-sized phone company to support.
You also need "dark" fibre between two points to bring everything up, so existing fibre infrastructures won't work well with the stunt. Forget this coming to your neighborhood anytime soon unless your name is Gates or Buffet or someone else on the Fortune billionaire's list.
Network geeks like me reckon the real value to this stunt is that phone companies could flush a whole layer of their legacy infrastructure on the backbone side while gaining higher network speeds, skipping over 10 Gbps backbone links and going straight to 40 Gbps. No dorking around with OC-whatever protocols required.
The demonstration also points out the value of fibre in the ground and to the home and buildings when compared to copper or cable and the patchwork of solutions needed to rev up the speeds of both for delivery of high speed data, with HDTV being the highest-speed type of data people want these days.
For real-world, large scale deployments to the home, Verizon's FiOS plant currently has the most underestimated potential for high-speed consumer broadband delivery. Verizon hasn't been shy in highlighting its GPON technology. The company thinks it can deliver symmetrical data speeds between 50 to 100 Mbps, plus a whole wavelength of light just dedicated to video. Put another way, it has three wavelengths of light, one that has the total data carrying capacity of what a cable company has on their cable.
But, Verizon's worst enemy may be its own conservative don't-push-the-envelope-too-much mindset, offering just enough bandwidth to compete with the existing cable broadband offering. So some regions may get 35 Mbps, others may have 50 Mbps, and still others may get as much as 100 Mbps, all depending on how fast and aggressive the local cable company has their speed dialed up.
The Verizon engineering guys say their GPON gear can be dialed up to 200 Mbps symmetrical bandwidth with no hardware changes and they could do so upon market support and market demand. This is the cable company killer app, since the cable companies are just starting to get around to DOCSYS 3.0 and the potential for 200 Mbps speed.
By the cable people start seriously deploying DOCSYS 3.0, Verizon will likely move out of GPON in, of course, the selected markets deploying DOCSYS 3.0, and move up to either WDM-PON or 10GB-PON or whatever is the best cost and most cost-effective alternatives. It's premature to say exactly what speeds the end user at home would get, but 1GBps or faster to the home would be likely, assuming all that expensive 40GBps to 100GBps backbone gear is up to support everything.
