Not in Terms of Broadband Internet to the Home
Recent studies have reported that the US ranks 25th out of 39 countries in home Internet speeds, behind such countries as Moldova, Latvia, and Estonia, and more than 3x slower than global leaders, such as Singapore. According to netindex.com, the average consumer download speed in the US is 37.1 Mbps compared to Hong Kong at 101.86 Mbps, Japan at 103 Mbps, and Singapore at 133.5 Mbps.
EATEL aims to change that. With our 100% fiber optic network connectivity in Louisiana, we are offering speeds that are 10x faster than standard high-speed Internet connections. Our GIG Internet service offers speeds of 1,000 Mbps to Ascension and Livingston Parish residents. And that means, they are among consumers receiving the fastest home Internet connectivity speeds in the US.
So, why does the rest of the US lag far behind when it comes to broadband connectivity to the home?
In this country, we are not embracing a "build-it-and-they-will-come" model, as is being done in other parts of the world. The US is waiting for consumer electronics, 4K TV, virtual reality, and other bandwidth-intensive applications to become widely embraced first.
However, there is hope as we are seeing leadership being taken by the Federal Communications Commission to drive standards and advocate for more bandwidth, resiliency, and reliability. The fact is, the US still lags far behind the rest of the world when it comes to Internet speed.
In the next couple of years, gigabit speeds to the home will become the standard offering. Consumers will use this for almost every electronic device and new digital service in the home, including high-definition security cameras. Whether it’s providing the ability to have your kids punch in a code so you’ll know they’re home from school safely, or an Internet camera allowing you to see who is at the front door — all of these capabilities require more bandwidth.
Service providers need to shift their business models to support, what is called the Internet of Things (IoT). With IoT, we are seeing an ecosystem of mini connected devices in the home. From cellphones to coffee makers, thermostats to washing machines, refrigerators to garage doors, and headphones to wearable devices — everything will share data and be connected via the Internet.
The analyst firm Gartner (http://www.gartner.com/) says that by 2020 there will be over 26 billion connected devices. Cisco (www.cisco.com) estimates the IoT will consist of 50 billion devices. Robotic vacuum cleaners, ultra-high definition TVs, automobile maintenance sensors — all of these are going to be consuming more and more bandwidth. As virtual reality with devices such as Oculus Rift catch on, the home will need a next-generation bandwidth provider.
Simply put, the consumer’s desire to experience all this technology is driving the need for more bandwidth, and Gigabit positions EATEL to meet these demands in a reliable and scalable fashion.
Feeding the Bandwidth-Hungry Devices
Many companies are now in the process of laying fiber cables for greater speed. For example, Google is in the midst of an expanded rollout for high-speed Internet. Always leading the market, this move from Google underscores today’s demand for faster connectivity. Regarding the evolution of video content, for example when resolution goes up from the current high definition to 4K and ultra high-definition — new formats like these will require higher bandwidth to the home.
It’s a fact: more devices and users will come online and higher bandwidth will be required to service them all. We are already seeing many cable companies that are traditionally based in HFC network, or cable modem technology, and even some of the DSL telecoms with twisted pair copper plants, getting permits to lay fiber to the curb. Most of these companies are adopting active or passive fiber-to-the-home technologies.
While some service providers are rolling out the current generation GPON, others will be looking
at Next-Generation Passive Optical Network 2 (NGPON2) to position themselves to offer 10 gigabit Ethernet services.
This is the roadmap over the next 2 or 3 years: to overlay NGPON2 on top of the existing GPON fiber network. Companies who are already invested in this network will be rolling out the next generation of bandwidth services to capitalize on the market trend, as the other companies are beginning their first steps.
Since 2005, EATEL has been investing in fiber-to-the-home services. Soon after, we were selling video services over an all fiber network.
This demand will eventually lead to 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections to the edge of the network, and require upgrades to 100 Gigabit backbones to tie those networks together. Then, as we go the last mile to the homes and businesses, we use the same physical fiber in the ground, but make upgrades to the electronics and overlay the fiber network with wavelengths to offer more bandwidth. Early adopters of GPON embracing this overlay and upgrade strategy don’t have to open the ground again to lay new fiber. They can go from Gigabit to 10 Gigabit very quickly — a far more flexible strategy to serve businesses and consumers.
Cooking Faster Internet Speeds in the Backbone Kitchen
The core investments for us to achieve these ultra-fast speeds are made in Cisco’s ASR 9000 router platform. It’s highly scalable and can support our needs today with the 10 Gigabit backbone and scale up to 100 Gbps as needed.
We’ve also made investments in Adtran’s Optical Networking Edge (ONE) as it delivers an innovative, right-sized, Packet Optical Solution, integrated with access and transport. It supports a variety of applications, including mobile backhaul, business Ethernet, residential broadband, and data centers. New highly-scalable processors give us the 40 and 80 gig switching fabric to support Next-Generation Technologies. The company has also made investments in wave-multi platforms to connect physical sites and get more efficiency out of the physical fiber optic cable already laid.
We can also overlay this technology to get more capacity out of a single fiber strand. The ONE solution allows us to multiplex active or passive DWDM systems over these long haul fiber routes where we have limited dark fiber available today. In our opinion, this is a very scalable architecture to allow services to grow incrementally, without having to go back out with more backhoes to dig up neighborhood streets.
As we also begin to explore Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networks (SDN), the company will use leased lines to provide better quality of service, security and performance that could not be achieved using an over the top solution. Vendors are supporting many of these applications with products that are now hardware, but will soon be software-based. This allows service providers like us to virtualize components in an ecosystem, ultimately giving them more redundancy, reliability and scalability. Instead of having those assets physically anchored to a specific geographic location, now they can all become virtual machines and move back and forth to any cloud or data center. Using these new software-based services, businesses will virtualize devices that have been on premises, such as routing or firewalls, to ultimately render a virtual firewall within the data center, instead of having a smaller device on site that will become a failure point.
We also see SDN shifting some of the higher layer functions, such as Layer 3 and above, into the Cloud. There are ways to do this that will be a positive experience to the customer — that will allow the company to be competitive in price, and have better resiliency and scalability by shifting from a premises-based hardware solution into a nimbler Cloud-based solution.
All this commoditization of gigabit Ethernet services enables high-speed bandwidth to reach many businesses and consumers who previously could not afford it. It’s the natural evolution of technology driven by bandwidth-hungry devices connected around every corner. For businesses, it allows them to be more agile, and to also lower capital expenses as legacy telephone PBX systems become virtualized and hosted in the Cloud. In addition, SD-WAN connections will eliminate expensive, private lines of yesteryear, to offer consumers and businesses software-only network upgrades and increased bandwidth upon demand.
Our Gigabit Ethernet service is a foundation for this, because once you have the fiber optics in place, all other things scale on top of it. Whether it’s hosted voice in the cloud, NFV-based routing or virtual firewalls — as long as you offer the fiber-optic gigabit foundation you can layer everything right on top.
The day when "dumb devices" in the home seamlessly transcended geographic boundaries and once complicated and prolonged network upgrades will soon be performed entirely in software. It’s up to the US to embrace and ease the broadband expansion or suffer an even greater lag behind the rest of the world.
Save
