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Aliant's Fiber to the Home Trial
By Mark Evans | February 8, 2005
An ex-pat living in the U.K. twigged me on to an intriguing trial that Aliant Inc. is conducting involving fiber-to-the-home over the next year. It will feature more than 30Mbps of bandwidth to 32 residences in Bedford, N.S. The trial will start with 10Mbps Internet service, TV and music on the PC and Aliant Security.
Without talking to Aliant, it's difficult to get a handle on what Aliant is doing. You have to remember Aliant - then known as NBTel - killed its innovative interactive-TV service called Vibe after BCE Inc. took control a few years ago. BCE wanted to promote its satelllite-television service rather than continue the development of Vibe.
Aliant is either serious about FTTH, or it's simply making sure it gets a good handle on the technology first-hand, or it's acting as a test bed for BCE's Bell Canada unit. Not sure about the third option because Bell has been adamant about adopting the less expensive fiber-to-the-node strategy. But given I haven't heard of other FTTH trails in Canada, Aliant's “trial” is worth watching
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February 26th, 2005 at 9:14 am
Aliant's trial appears to be an ATM-based BPON, similar to Verizon's offering. It is technically inferior to GEPON, part of the IEEE 802.3ah spec. Although the spec was finalized just last summer, there are already manufacturers offering equipment and large deployments announced in Japan.
http://www.utstar.com/Solutions/Broadband/BAN/GEPON/
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