What is FTTH?
Fiber to the home (FTTH), is different from the traditional fiber/copper architecture. Instead of installing fiber to the neighborhood and copper or coaxial cable for the last mile, the FTTH architecture runs fiber to, or into, the user's home or office. This eliminates the potential bottleneck represented by copper or coax in the last mile. Until recently, the limited capacity of copper or coax would not have been a problem, but the increasing popularity of bandwidth-hungry services like high-definition television
(HDTV), movies on demand, interactive online games, and home offices is pushing copper and coaxial facilities to their limits and, in some cases, beyond.
One such bottleneck is the slowdown in Internet access that many cable customers experience at busy times of day. This shouldn't come as any surprise, since demand for Internet bandwidth alone is doubling every year. It doesn't take too many users streaming music, playing games, or downloading video to overwhelm a coaxial cable segment that is already burdened with dozens of TV channels. Phone and cable companies have implemented "high-speed" protocols like DSL, or have restructured their networks to reduce the amount of traffic on individual cable segments,
but these have been stopgap measures at best. FTTH, on the other hand, with its vastly greater capacity, permanently eliminates the slowdown.
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