Verizon brings fiber to the user's fingertips

Verizon may be the most aggressive U.S. telco for delivering Fiber to the Premises (FTTP)-based services, but its ambitions don't stop at the residential customer. Now, the same technology being used to penetrate MDUs with FTTP in New York and other regions is now being leveraged to create a fiber-to-the-desktop (FTTD) service for commercial business users. This idea is not vaporware as Verizon Business previously launched a GPON-based FTTD service for the federal government in partnership with integrator SAIC.

In developing its Optical LAN Solutions (OLS) offering, Verizon did not have to look too far for the technology it would use. Similar to its MDU FTTP deployments, OLS also leverages a singlemode fiber and the same GPON gear (Optical Line Terminals, Optical Network Units and fiber distribution hubs) to establish a local area network that can deliver about 25 terahertz of capacity over 12 miles. Similar to the traditional Layer-2 services it already offers business customers OLS also supports a mix of voice, data and video service with flexible bandwidth capabilities.    

William Kight, Verizon group manager and network engineer says that all the work it has done serving residential users with GPON-based services has helped it make a case to develop an FTTD service for business users. "Because of the residential deployments, the cost of all the technology associated with GPON has come down to the point where we could use it in the enterprise," Kight says.

Among the many new innovations it pushed its vendors for in deploying FTTP to MDUs include less expensive ONUs, bend-insensitive fiber, and pre-connectorized fiber drops developed by vendors such as ADC.

For more:
- LightReading has this article [1]
- Telecommunications also chronicled FTTD here [2]

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