High-Speed Reconsidered
If you think cable is a "high-speed" medium, consider this. A small movie download is about five gigabytes (GB) of data. Some DVDs can be larger than 100 gigabytes. Over cable, a five GB download would take about three hours. FTTH reduces that download time to a few minutes. And while FTTH is relatively new in "last mile" implementations, fiber has been widely deployed by service providers for 30 years, during which it has proven itself to be cost-effective and highly reliable.

What FTTH Enables

With the advent of the Internet, users have grown accustomed to seeing, hearing, and reading whatever they wanted whenever they wanted it, virtually without limit. Today, that expectation is becoming universal. We want to watch movies when the mood strikes us. We want to make videos and upload them to the world and place phone calls over the Internet. And we want to play games with hundreds or thousands of other players interacting in real time.

We want to be able to work at home with the same capabilities we have in the office, including face-to-face contact. We want to be able to bank, shop, even see the doctor, all without leaving the house. And when we're away from home, we want to be able to manage and monitor the security systems and appliances we've left behind.

Considering the speed with which these capabilities have emerged, we should expect other services we haven't even imagined, to appear in coming years. Individually, these capabilities vary in their bandwidth requirements, but taken together the demand will be enormous. Most users' expectations are still fairly modest, but DSL and cable are beginning to stagger under the load. The only real solution is fiber-to-the-home or FTTH.