Washington Post Online | Thursday, January 17, 2002; Page LZ01 | By Mike Musgrove
A new housing development near Leesburg will be a testing ground for a new fiber-optic network by Verizon Communications Inc.
In addition to such routine services as street maintenance and trash removal, residents in the first phase of the Brambleton planned community will receive television service and high-speed Internet access as part of their monthly $187.10 homeowners fee.
Brambleton President Bill Fox said the high-tech offering is a way for the community to differentiate itself as it is marketed to technology workers shopping for homes in the area.
“Our potential customers are young, well-paid and much more tech-literate than a lot of customers,” he said.
Thomas Reiman, president of The Broadband Group, a Sacramento-based consulting firm that negotiated with Verizon on Brambleton’s behalf and helped to design the community’s technology plan, said he sees potential residents everywhere.
“Look at what surrounds Brambleton,” he said. “AOL’s world headquarters, WorldCom, UUNet, XO Communications. The workforce, and therefore the family, supports technology acceptance.”
In addition to fast Web connections, residents will also have access to a community-wide intranet, a private slice of online space where residents eventually can connect with each other to find babysitters and jogging partners and to meet other real-world needs.
The same fiber-optic network will also carry residents’ telephone conversations and television signals from a cable provider that has not been announced.
Verizon is optimistic but cautious about the trial run.
“This really is a first for us,” said Paul Miller, a spokesman for Verizon. “We’re not sure how the economics will work out, so we’ll see after a year.” Although Verizon has tried other “technical trials” of the technology, this is the first time the company will be billing for use of a residential, all fiber-optic connection.
Most of Verizon’s Internet customers receive data over mixed sections of fiber-optic cable and copper wire. Usually, however, the fiber-optic cable network forms only the skeleton of Verizon’s network, and data are carried inside the home by coaxial cable or copper wire.
Fiber-optic networks have advantages over cable systems or copper wire telephone networks. The main advantage is that fiber-optic networks, which transmit laser signals through strands of glass, have a higher bandwidth — more capacity — than DSL lines or cable modem access, the usual residential connections made over telephone lines.
“There’s really no limit to the bandwidth” of fiber optics, said Stephen Montgomery, an analyst for ElectroniCast Corp., which is a market research firm for the fiber-optic industry and is based in San Mateo, Calif. “You can always make it go faster.”
Fiber-optic networks also have fewer technical limitations than other options. DSL connections, for example, have become available slowly, if at all, in non-urban and rural areas because users must be near phone company switching offices.
The main obstacle for fiber-optic networks has been cost. Although fiber-optic lines can be less expensive by the foot than copper wire, the supporting electronics for fiber optics is more costly.
Only the first 680 homes in the community will be wired. If the trial run is successful, the fiber-optic network may be expanded to other neighborhoods as the community is developed.
The entire 2,000-acre Brambleton development eventually will have more than 6,000 units and its own golf course. The first phase, with home prices ranging from about $350,000 to more than $500,000, should have its first residents by mid-August, Fox said.
Each Brambleton home in the first phase will come with a laptop-size appliance called an OEC, or optical-to-electric converter, used to change light signals transmitted through the cable into signals understood by computers or telephones.
Verizon would not disclose how much it is paying for the converters, but the component typically costs in the low thousands of dollars. Verizon said it eventually hopes to recoup its investment through monthly fees.
“Brambleton is the largest trial we’re involved in,” said Jim Blew, a spokesman for Marconi Corp. plc, the company that manufactures the converters. Blew said Marconi converters will also be used in residential fiber-optic network trials in Palo Alto, Calif., and Chelan County, Wash.
Fiber-optic networks are much more common in office buildings in such financial centers as San Francisco or New York, Montgomery said, partly because the networks are considered secure.
Brambleton, and other similar trials, aren’t the first attempts to connect fiber-optic networks in the home, however. Reiman, of The Broadband Group, helped to install a residential fiber-optic network in a 250-home community in Orlando 16 years ago.
The network is still there, though use of fiber optics to the home didn’t catch on in the sunny state. Reiman said that experiment was an example of “technology getting too far ahead of the consumer’s ability to use it.”
Reiman said he hopes that the second time will be a charm. “It’s a much more logical investment today,” he said.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company