Fiber Optics Fans Foresee Lightning-Fast Web Access

SBC joins small but growing band of firms offering fiber-optic broadband.

Tom Spring, PCWorld.com

LAS VEGAS-- High-speed Internet access is getting even faster, but it's coming to customers at a snail's pace.

The latest innovation comes from phone giant SBC Communications, which has announced plans to pipe lightning-fast fiber-optic broadband Internet access to small businesses and select homes. The speed boost from using fiber optics is considerable--transmissions hit up to 10 gigabits per second, which makes even the fastest cable and DSL modems look poky.

The technology will appear first in small Houston-area businesses and in a new San Francisco housing development, says Ross Ireland, SBC's senior executive vice president. The rollout is part of SBC's Project Pronto initiative, which aims to deliver high-speed access to all of its customers, Ireland told attendees in a keynote speech at the Networld+Interop show here.

Businesses Get First Shot

Optical networks are considered the Holy Grail of Internet access, capable of easily handling massive bandwidth capacity along with voice and video traffic on a single line. Ireland says rollouts of fiber optics will begin this year in Texas but will ramp up in 2002. SBC expects to serve about 6000 consumers by the end of next year, at speeds of 1.5 megabits per second and up.

But broadband speed freaks shouldn't hold their breath for superfast Net connections. It will be years before this brand of speedy Net access makes it to consumers, say John Mazur, an analyst at Gartner Dataquest.

"Today, for the most part, the focus on deployment of the last mile has been with business," Mazur says.

An Alternative to T1, T3

SBC is following the lead of smaller firms that have been selling fiber-optic connections as an alternative to T1 and T3 Internet lines for about a year. Yipes Communications, Telseon, and Cogent Communications are among those marketing so-called Gigabit Ethernet services in about 20 metropolitan areas.

For businesses, fiber optics offers an alternative to high-speed T1 and T3 business connections. Unlike current high-speed broadband technology that transmits data over copper and coaxial cable lines, fiber-optic technology can transmit data, video, and voice in the form of light over glass. On a single strand of fiber no thicker than a human hair, a feature-length film can download in 4 seconds.

Optical networks will play a major role in businesses, aiding them in Web hosting, connecting company LANs located far apart, and performing tasks such as remote backup, says Sterling Perring, an analyst with market research firm IDC.

Fiber-optic networks have matured over time. It used to be that phone companies could use fiber-optic cable but send only one stream of data. But new optical technology called wavelength multiplexing allows SBC and others to split the fiber into as many as 160 channels. Each channel is capable of carrying as much data as a single fiber used to carry.

More Options With Optical

Yipes and other companies can undercut the prices of conventional broadband providers because the hardware to run an ethernet network is far less expensive. Telseon says ethernet equipment costs are 10 percent of the costs of traditional voice networks.

Optical providers can also offer, with a single line, a much broader range of network connection speeds. You pay only for what you want, when you want it, says Jonathan Marshall, spokesperson for Yipes.

"This builds scalability into the network infrastructure," Marshall says. One line into a business can scale from 1.5 mbps to 1000 mbps in a matter of seconds.

Yipes charges businesses around $1000 monthly for an optical connection at 10 mbps. Cogent says it sells network connections up to 100 mbps for $1000 per month. Those prices are roughly one-third the cost of traditional T1 and T3 services offered by the likes of Verizon and Pacific Bell.

The Optical Waiting Game

However, mass adoption of fiber-optic broadband, even for businesses, is not imminent. That is because optical lines pass by only a tiny fraction of businesses and homes, and network construction costs are steep, IDC's Perring notes.

Presently, about 200 million homes and businesses are touched by copper telephone line in the United States. Fiber reaches only about 40,000 businesses and far fewer residences, says Dave Schaeffer, Cogent's chief executive officer.

In addition, even fiber optics companies are feeling the economic downturn. Networking firms are being forced to pare back deployment of conventional broadband networks, let alone fiber optics, to focus on their bottom line.

And while customers might be receptive to ethernet's promise of flexibility and capacity, the technology lacks a track record of large-scale reliability, Perrin says.

Do you need modem speeds over 1 mbps to view most Web sites? Not yet, perhaps. But Internet traffic is doubling every three months, Mazur notes. Optical networks may be one of the few feasible ways to meet demand.

"Otherwise [the Web] will return to the 'World Wide Wait,'" Mazur says.