Lightreading 最新的报告：The Future of Fiber Access
分析了最近全球的光纤接入市场趋势和应用趋势，非常有参考价值：

1.1    Intro: The End of the Line for Copper?
Conventional wisdom used to have it that to see the future of fixed telecom, you should look East to Japan or South Korea for Fiber/Optical Fiber access – or to India for, say, Mobile WiMax. Now that Verizon Communications Inc. is starting to roll out fiber access, even the U.S. is worth a look.

But to know when the future really has arrived, eagle-eyed sceptics should perhaps look at what BT Group plc is doing in the U.K. This national incumbent has notoriously held out against blowing the shareholder dividend on fiber access, so when the company finally said it might roll out fiber in a big way (as it did in July 2008, although with a huge financial proviso), it signaled that fiber access is for real, even if not a reality for most Brits.

But there is a serious point here. New technology and infrastructure costs money and big infrastructures for the mass market cost big money, and so there has to be a big payback, which may look uncertain. BT is not the only telco to agonize over this. But, if a market and industry are really shifting, there comes a point where that investment becomes table stakes – and without it, participation cannot continue. BT has clearly reached that point. As in the stock market, when the most skeptical throw in the towel, you know the market has cleared.

And even Light Reading itself is a minor indicator of fiber's coming of age. The monthly hit rates of two-year-old (and over) reports on FTTx-related topics (see PON & FTTx Update and VDSL2) are still rock solid at a high level – so there is real interest out there on telco fiber access.

"FTTH as a science project – those days are over,” says Floyd Wagoner, director of product marketing for Motorola Inc. (NYSE: MOT - message board)'s access networks business. "The global broadband market today is served by two areas from a telco perspective: DSL and fiber. DSL accounts for 66 percent of the global broadband connections worldwide, and fiber accounts now for 11 percent. I think the shift to fiber has absolutely occurred, and will continue to grow."

The pressure for widespread fiber is mounting as users and governments fret over the threat of a widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. Says Andrew McGrath, commercial director at ntl:Telewest Business :

"The last pan-European broadband speed study found that only six other nations in a league table of 23 European countries have slower speeds than in the U.K. This is down in large part to legacy networks still depending on antiquated copper wiring to transmit high volumes of data. The lag is frustrating enough for consumers, but represents a serious threat to profitability for organizations relying on connectivity. Businesses also need to use media-rich applications to gain competitive edge and drive efficiency. The technical capabilities of next-generation networks are required more than ever to support this shift."

So fixed telecom operators are embracing fiber access. The transition to fiber will take a long time and will probably prove tortuous in many countries, but the landscape has definitely begun to change, and this is going to affect many different players – service providers, vendors, users, regulators, and so on – in possibly unforeseen ways.

That we are talking of an era of transition has implications of its own. In many countries only a minority will have fiber access for quite a time, and maybe some will never get it. How will service providers cope with such a split? What does it mean for service evolution? For regulatory remedies?

Interestingly, fiber may be the first example of such an "era effect" in the technology transformation of the telecom mass market. The three big other technology transformations – mobile, Internet/Web access, and basic broadband – although they had fairly long gestation times before they entered the mass market, were rolled out in large amounts within only a few years once a threshold had been crossed. But fiber looks a much bigger, more difficult, and longer job for many telcos.

So this report tries to take a very provisional look at how some aspects of mass-market fiber access are evolving and how the industry is responding to some of the new issues raised.

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