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Faster fiber to the home

We haven't seen much deployment of fiber to the home in the U.S. because of the costs involved, but MIT Technology Review says circuits that integrate electronics with optical components may speed things up. [Link]

Today, fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) is available in only about 15 U.S. cities, as well as some urban areas in Japan, Korea, and China, in part because it takes a huge investment of time and money to build all the infrastructure: to dig new trenches, to lay new fiber, and to install the fiber utility box on homes.

But there's another hold up: it's expensive to manufacture and deploy all the individual optic-fiber devices, called "triplexers," that must be affixed to houses. These triplexers, which come into play where the fiber connects to the home, contain the electrical and optical components that guide and collect the data-carrying photons that become Web pages, telephone calls, or video.

While new technology may do little to solve the problem of ditch-digging, it could make it much cheaper to produce triplexers, by integrating multiple functions onto a single chip. This technology, called a planar lightwave circuit (PLC), is already used in some fiber network applications. But there it integrates only optical components -- for applications such as triplexers, the chip needs to incorporate both electrical and optical components.

jon posted this at 7:27 AM
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