isen.blog

If architecture is politics, as Professor Lessig and others point out, then PON is the politics of centralized control because it puts control of the network back in the central office, stamps out individual choice and requires centralized planning. (The intelligence-at-the-edge alternative is home run architecture, where every customer can run his or her own connection at the speed he or she needs . . . but you won't see the telcos doing that.)

The good news is that Verizon seems to be installing its PON-flavored FTTH with reasonable speed. One correspondent wrote to me yesterday to say that Verizon was pulling fiber in his back yard right now, and that his service would be 60 megabits per second. A Verizon lineman working in my neighborhood last week told me that my neighborhood is scheduled for fiber next year.

But is Verizon in a box of its own making? And is it there deliberately or not? Ed Gubbins, in this article in Telephony Online, writes,

While Verizon is deploying the passive optical networking (PON) equipment it chose last year, many of the smaller telcos that are deploying FTTP this year are leapfrogging Verizon with Gigabit PON (GPON), which offers twice the bandwidth. The increasing maturity of GPON and big-bandwidth Ethernet access systems further calls into question the righteousness of Verizon's PON architecture.

Upgrading PON requires that all customers upgrade simultaneously when the central office upgrades. Will 2G-PON be available next year? In ten years it is entirely likely that Verizon's FTTH PON customers be stuck with service that seems retarded and obsolete.

Maybe this is Verizon's way out of the Paradox of the Best Network -- in a mere few years scarcity will reign again.