My commentary on the brief video posted about Verizon’s millionth FIOS customer caused a bit of a stir in the previous issue of the Viodi View. If I came across as skeptical, it may be because of the lingering wounds from the RBOCs’ false broadband starts of the early to mid-1990s. Times have changed, however, and now the FTTH deployments are real and there is no going back.

To get some perspective of what things were like in 1994 and how history did not always follow the predicted path, read this paper from the National Fiber Optics Engineering Conference that predicted FTTH sometime between 2007 and 2018.

Prospects for the Migration of a HFC Tech to a FTTH Implementation

I wrote this paper when I worked for a company called Raynet – a pioneer in the Fiber to the Curb market. I had been at Raynet for about three years and we were finally getting traction, with Nynex and others committing to upgrade their local loops with our product. The purpose of this paper was to counter suggestions from one of the big telco research labs that Fiber to the Home would be a realistic alternative to the approach we were suggesting.

I apologize for the poor reproduction quality – the original electronic version is gone with the DOS. One of the amusing things in this white paper is the reference to the number of subscribers each of the RBOCs would have by the year 2000. Notably absent from this list was SBC (now AT&T), which took a much more conservative approach to video and the construction of new networks than its telco siblings.

Some of the terminology has been superseded and the technology has definitely evolved in the past 13 years. I cannot remember how I created the chart suggesting the initial commercial rollout of FTTH to would be in the 2007 to 2018 timeframe. Despite the somewhat weak statistical data in this article, the point that technology, especially that which requires changes to the physical infrastructure or cultural changes, sometimes takes a lot longer to implement than the technologists predict.