I need a reality check... For telcos, going from barely twisted copper pair to FTTH presents huge incremental improvement. FTTN is basically a stop gap medium term solution that is more pleasing to some beancounters. However, for a cable company, is there an advantage to deploy FTTH/GPON to bring light originally destined to the neighbourhood node all the way to the home and do away with coax ?
From what I have read, cablecos limit FTTH deployments to greenfields.
Do they save much by replaciung the "node" with a simple optical splitter which no longer limits how much upstream bandwidth is retransmitted back to head end ? Will there be a point in the next 10 years where cable companies might start to upgrade brownfields from coax to FTTH as some telcos have done ? While in Canada, FTTH deployment by telcos has been accompanied with IPTV deployments on the data path (single wavelength), I hear that Verizon has used twin wavelengths, on for GPON data, and one for RFoG for TV signals. Would it be fair to state that FIOS is basically identical to FTTH deployments by cable companies ? Do twin wavelength systems as deployed by Verizon end up costing far more ? Or is the price difference mininal ? Any information/insight appreciated.