I ran across a great article today in CED Magazine (touted as the Premier Magazine of Broadband Technology). The article title (The business case for GPON in FTTP networks) did not necessarily draw me in. I figured it would be too technical to hold my interest but really it much of it could just as easily been a business case for fiber.

It seems that I’ve been reading a lot of policy stuff lately. The discussion there is still “Do we need broadband? Who will build it? Who will own it? What if it goes bust? How would we use it?…” This article spells it out – video is new but it’s growing in popularity and it requires serious bandwidth.

The article starts with the premise, “in order to remain competitive, service providers need more capacity to carry bandwidth-intensive applications.”

I have to say that I’m not always a proponent of letting the market drive industry – but it seems as if there won’t be much but a few outbursts of fiber communities until the market demand is there. This article as I said helps build that business case of market demand.

Here’s a nice picture of demand:

Throughput is particularly important for enabling triple-play services (voice, video and broadband). For example, a household with broadband service, two standard-definition (SD) TVs and one HDTV uses between 16 Mbps and 26 Mbps. Add in more demanding HD services, and the bandwidth requirements grow to between 59 Mbps and 85 Mbps per household.