Verizon's FiOS is sweet! Admittedly I'm not an early adopter by any means, but recently I took the plunge and I don't regret I did. After reading pretty extensively on dslreports.com I felt good about ordering up some fiber. I know, I know most cable companies in fact do use fiber themselves to a local break out where they bring coax to your house. Still for an infrastructure geek like myself, the closer the fiber the better! 1Gbit right to my dwelling, how can you beat that?You can't, but you can screw up the fundamentals. Allow me to introduce you to MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance). MoCA is a foundation dedicated to enabling ethernet data over existing coax. This is a sweet cost saving idea, why not leverage existing cabling to complete a $23 Billion dollar investment? I'll tell you why - cause you just spent $23 billion bucks and you're building a bottle neck in to this shiny new fiber optic system at the end users house. Verizon's MoCA use enables set top boxes (cable boxes, or STBs) to get their network data over coax, but in most cases it doesn't end there. The installer will most of the time (especially if you ordered FiOS Tv) use coax from the ONT (optical network terminal, where the fiber terminates on the side of your house) to your router.
How it works:
Verizon brings fiber optic to your house, to your ONT, which "converts" your fiber in to several outputs, currently used are coax, ethernet and voice. (there's an unused video connection too) Usually your ethernet port is ignored (and turned off), while your TV stations and data network are sent on the coax. So quick point here, coming out of your router is the following traffic on your coax: internet data, lan data, tv stations. Of course they are all at different frequencies on the copper pipe as to not interfere with each other.
Ok, lets review shall we? What's the transfer speed of fiber at it's current spec? 1Gbit, What's the transfer speed of Cat5e at it's current spec? 1Gbit, What's the transfer speed of MoCA at spec 1.1? 175Mbits. I know, I know, current implementation of FiOS, including VOD (which is streamed IPTV, over your data network to your STB) doesn't approach 1Gbit of data. Not even close, so why do I blog?
Because it's stupid, they develop a literal speed of light network and build a potential bottle neck right in to it... Have they learned nothing from cable companies? The ever pushing of DOCSIS which is resulting in more and more compressed (and usually crappier looking) data. Now you CAN get your data installed over the Ethernet port on the ONT, no problem, but if you're not using a MoCA device (such as a NIM100, or an Actiontec router) your STB won't be able to get guide info or video on demand (VOD). Oh, did I forget to mention the FiOS STBs have an ethernet port on them! That isn't enabled!
sigh. Does Verizon really think in the lifetime of the fiber they've hung that we won't be up to 1Gbit speeds?
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control.. Control... CONTROL
ReplyDeletesure, NetNeutrality is socialist at heart, like the many hippies involved with DARPA, but it likely wouldn't have been too tolerant of this .. "oh you want ethernet? you'll have to wire that yourself" ... even though they'd have to run RG6 on a virgin house
you might want to muse on the default remote access enabled or the WEP key:mac fiasco
Some day TV sets will have fiber conections and computers will also, then verizon can connect directly to both devices with super high speeds. Verizon only has this solution at this time while other catch up in media fiber.
ReplyDeletePLEASE BE CAREFUL; WHEN YOU DISCONNECT FIOS EARLY BECUS YOU MOVE TO A PLACE WITH NO FIOS. THEY CHARGE YOU TERMINATION FEES.. THEY NEVER MENTION THIS WHEN YOU FIRST GET FIOS. THEY SAY THAT YOU CAN DISCONNECT IF YOU DONT GET FIOS IN YOUR NEW AREA. THEY TRY TO FORCE THIER TELEPHONE SERVICE DOWN YOUR THROAT
ReplyDeleteWow, thanks for educating me on who poor a job Verizon has done in creating a high speed SCALABLE infrastructure. My hopes after having waited some requisite years for FiOS to mature gracefully has been dashed.
ReplyDeleteIt's like DoH!!! The redundancy built-in to the MoCA standard is just mind boggling. Is the ethernet outlet they have built into MoCA routers that come in from the ONT 10/100 or gigE?
At first I thought DLNA was a scalable solution until learning that DLNA doesn't extend beyond fibercoax communication and is strictly for facilitating network devices in the HOME.
Two possibilities, however, give me hope. First, since the fiber is located to close to your home, terminating at the ONT device, then requiring an interface into a router with MoCA support, then all this requires is continued improvements in the MoCA standard that works to eliminate the bottleneck to improve overall MoCA latency in its bandwidth provisioning. This is where MoCA's long term viability still blows away anything seen in the latest iteration of docsis (3.0) a standard fast approaching it's EOL date since it's bottleneck is the total number of channels available in one RG-6 fibercoax cable at any given time, and the reason 3.0 must resort to channel bonding and teaming schemes to increase bandwidth exponentially.
So MoCA still has plenty of room to grow and mature before I'll consider the transition considering how much more FiOS costs compared to CC.
The other hope I had was in seeing a huge focus in the next gen standards like MoCA and DLNA to finally use multicast technologies and the IP's that were designed for precisely this sort of horizontal growth of densely populated networks. With both IPV6 and multicasting capabilities defaulting on in the next gen cisco routers that will make subnet to subnet online integration far more seamless than it might initially appear ... well let's see what they have in mind.