Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Verizon Getting MDU Act Together

LightReading published an article today discussing how far Verizon has to go to address the MDU market with its FiOS FTTP service. Verizon is bringing FiOS to single family homes but is just starting to address the MDU market. These MDUs account for about 25 percent of the homes in Verizon's territory. Bringing FiOS to the MDUs requires negotiating with each landlord individually. Verizon will use fiber or VDSL to bring the service to each unit within the building.

You can see the full LightReading article at

http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=120485

This is an important step for Verizon. MDUs are very important in dense metropolitan areas such as Boston and Manhattan.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Bob

In the article, the VZ guy was quoted saying they would prefer use Coax befor using VDSL. Only when there's no Coax wiring, will they deploy FiOS via VDSL.
Can you give us an estimate of the precentage of MDUs that don't have Coax wirings but only have copper wires?
What makes them prefer Coax over copper?

TIA

Bob Larribeau said...

I don't have an estimate on the number of MDUs that do not have coax. I expect it is pretty small.
The cable companies probably installed coax in nearly all buildings to provide access to their services.

I wonder about using coax to serve an entire building. The coax may already be occupied by the cable service. I am also not sure how the coax plant in a building will support a separate LAN for each living unit. It is much clearer how VDSL and fiber will work.

Unknown said...

Geoff forrester said
look to companies like corinex.com ,mutli-let and mocca to lead the way in ethernet over coax soltions.
MDUs often have 20 suites per coax rum in a cascaded wiring configuration . There exists 200mbps solutions for this common type of cabling scheme which is sufficient for IPTV and easier to deploy than vdsl in retrofit properties

Bob Larribeau said...

There are a lot of ways of distributing voice, data, and video within buildings. Some new buildings are deploying fiber. A few buildings have Cat 5 wiring.

The MOCA approach that Geoff mentions is particularly good for Verizon's service, because it uses the RF spectrum for broadcast channels.