City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

THE LAST MILE 225
subscribers, but only 250 paid $9.95 a month for Main Street. And GTE was
keeping the details of its market trials proprietary because it was paying a lot
for that data.
A bit disappointed, I cruised through Cerritos, looking for a sense of the
planned community. I found private streets that greeted me as a trespasser,
with high walls facing the public roads. The town had been dairy farms in
the 1960s; now it seemed a fortress. I drove away to visit an old friend in
another suburb where you could see yards, houses, and people from the street.
Kawahata had dreamed of building a futuristic community when he
planned Hi-OVIS. The Canadians had tried to tailor their technology to the
needs of a rural community in Elie. The French had wanted Biarritz to be a
showplace. In Cerritos, GTE fit the mold of a subdivision, well planned and
tastefully arranged, yet somehow sterile. Other American phone companies
followed the Cerritos model, announcing home fiber trials in expensive new
developments with great fanfare yet never reporting results. Such silence is
the hallmark of failed experiments. The new technology had failed to grow
because it offered nothing new to the customers.
A New Generation
Many survivors of the field trial wars have concluded that fibers are simply
too expensive for home links. Bob Olshansky, now a top research manager
at GTE Labs, sees the future as connecting fibers to copper telephone wires
in your neighborhood. Digitize the signals, add new transmitters and receivers,
clean up the wires, and phone lines called digital subscriber lines can
carry millions of bits per second to the home, as long as it isn’t too far from
the phone company. That makes it attractive for Internet access, which he
considers a more attractive market than delivering video programs. 42
On the other side of the debate is the ever-optimistic Paul Shumate of
Bellcore, who believes a new technology called Passive Optical Networks will
bring costs down. Pioneered by British Telecom Labs, it saves on costly laser
transmitters by splitting optical signals among 8 or 16 homes. New inexpensive
lasers could meet the modest needs of home transmitters while easing
the packaging requirements that account for most of the cost of modern lasers.
43 New data-compression technology could pack more digitized signals
into fibers. Other savings come from careful attention to design details, like
providing power for home telephones and other electronics and avoiding repairs
caused by corrosion of metal cables. Put it all together, says Shumate,
and fiber to the home already is cheaper than other technologies in rural
areas where there are a dozen homes or fewer along each mile of roadway
served. He expects the costs to keep coming down, but admits ‘‘the timetable
is not real clear’’ for widespread fiber links. 44
In Japan, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone plans to run fibers past every
home by 2010, but that’s more cautious than it sounds. So far, NTT has
concentrated on the easy parts, stringing fiber to businesses in large cities. 45