The S&V Interview

Cleerline's position has evolved to "fiber now" because we've made the process of installation and termination—which was one of the largest barriers to deploying fiber—easier, safer, and more effective than any copper solution on the market. The benefit is essentially having the comfort of installing an infrastructure that will grow with technology. The bandwidth of fiber is constantly evolving with the devices that are connected to it, so it has a very long life span from this point forward.

New construction should incorporate fiber into the infrastructure; if it’s necessary to open up the walls of an existing home, fiber is still the better alternative because you won’t have to repeat the process. The latest technologies in Ultra HD require high bandwidth cable systems to move video around your home, but there is always the option of putting the devices closer to the display to reduce the need.

S&V: What’s your vision for residential bandwidth needs in the future, and how will they be addressed by fiber? Also, what’s driving this need for greater signal capacity throughout the home?
RD: There are two elements to residential bandwidth: bandwidth coming into the home and bandwidth within the home. This is where things get very interesting regarding the Internet of Things. The market is just starting to evolve and will have a profound effect on how we live and interact with the world around us. On some level it's very exciting, and in other areas it is a little off-putting or intrusive. I think there is a generational component here we don't understand fully that will play out over the next 10 years. Younger people are okay with their devices doing more for them on a daily basis, giving them recommendations, taking care of mundane tasks, or monitoring their energy usage. Older generations are reluctant to give up their light switch or don't want their phone communicating with the outside world without their explicit consent.

There is a gray area in between, but one very smart, connected individual told me the Surveillance State is both irresistible and irreversible. The more we allow our devices to take part in our lives, the more data there is to frame and paint a picture of our life.

IoT promises a lot of things—Cisco puts the number of devices deployed by 2020 at 19 trillion, Gartner has it far lower. The real challenge will be connectivity and bandwidth on the internal network. As more things are connected to your router, either wirelessly or hardwired, you will need a more sophisticated network with a lot more bandwidth than what you get from the off-the-shelf router and Apple or Linksys wireless access points (WAPs) used in most U.S. homes.

The biggest thing we see and believe is that IP, or Internet Protocol, is the great destructor of proprietary networks. We've seen this over the last 15 years with music distribution via Internet radio, Voice over IP telephones, and now video phones. The Internet of things is happening, and it is an unstoppable progression for society. Pretty much anything that draws power will be connected and IP addressable in the next five years, including your window shades, light bulbs, washer and dryer—if you can think of it, there will be a reason to connect it, even if that’s purely to report a status of on or off, functioning or not functioning. Every one of these devices will consume network bandwidth, little bits at a time, but a lot of little bits add up to a clogged network. That’s what Cisco is betting on. In the business environment it’s even worse.

Overall, a more sophisticated network is going to require higher bandwidth pipes to move data around the network. So if a house requires multiple WAPs then the connection between the router and WAP will need to be fiber in the long term.

S&V: Is there any benefit to having fiber inside the home if the “last 10 feet” of service to the house is still copper?
RD: Yes, there are two primary areas where residential infrastructure will benefit from an internal fiber backbone regardless of the Internet connectivity.

First, the best way to express this is in relation to pure networking infrastructure. In a business, bandwidth to the outside world has always been constrained but we've continually increased the internal bandwidth of the network—first it was 100Mbs, then 1Gps, now 10Gps. Fast 40 and 100Gps networks are on the horizon and deployed in data centers today. Bandwidth requirements for transferring data between devices on a network is constantly increasing—moving music, photos, personal videos, or general data usage increases every time we update or adopt the next generation device. Having a well built-out network is becoming as important as having the proper high voltage electrical service for the home. Can you get by without it? Sure, but having better infrastructure in place enables the end user to adopt the next generation of technologies without the headache of finding that the cable installed won't be sufficient and then facing the choice of being dissatisfied by their new technology or trying to retro fit the needed cabling after the fact.

The second area is specifically regarding AV connectivity. Larger homes and more advanced installations generally have components located either in a central head end, or at the very least in closets or furniture out of the way, in order to facilitate the current top of the line Ultra HD video formats for which the system needs 18.2Gps of throughput. The HDMI cable design and connector can only handle this up to 15 feet and, even then, it is not guaranteed. If the cable is bent too abruptly during installation or the connector is damaged slightly, the bandwidth of the cable could be reduced below the needed levels. That is why we are seeing more of a need for fiber in the home—to be able to transfer HDMI video over longer distances and accommodate how people want their audio/video systems setup within their homes.

There are many solutions coming into the market to achieve this, some of which are hybrid cable designs or Active Optical Cable (AOC) solutions and some are bulk fiber solutions that utilize media conversion on both ends of the bulk fiber cable installation. We are supporting all forms, but tend to prefer bulk solution to allow for the consumer to have the comfort that their cable will work for the next generation of technology. With AOC solutions the user is locked into the current generation technology that cable was built to support as there are active electrical components within the ends of the cable. With bulk fiber, the boxes connected on the ends can easily be replaced to accommodate the next generation of technology.