About FiOS
Verizon FiOS is the nation’s first fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service. FiOS leverages the latest advances in fiber optics technology to bring high-performance Internet and TV services to the home.
Traditional cable providers like Cablevision, Comcast, Cox, and Time Warner rely on coax transmission technology first developed more than 50 years ago. Some improvements have been made along the way, but an aging infrastructure and the legacy of analog carriage limits their ability to offer new features, channels, services, and faster broadband connections.
These traditional cable providers typically have 550MHz coax systems in smaller markets and 750-850MHz systems in major cities and more densely populated suburban areas. This bandwidth is shared between everything you get on cable, including Internet, TV, VOD, PPV, and phone service. Every analog channel on these systems consumes 6MHz of that bandwidth. If your cable system has 80 analog channels, that’s 480MHz of the system used. On a 550MHz system, that doesn’t leave much left for digital channels, high-definition, video-on-demand, or Internet.
Digital transmission is far more efficient than analog tranmission. With digital transmission and compression, cable providers can deliver 8x as many SD channels — with equal or better quality — as analog channels. Cable providers can also fit 2-3 HDTV channels in the same space as one analog channel. Fifty analog channels consumes the same bandwidth as 100-150 full-quality HDTV channels, or more than 200 of the “HDTV Lite” channels on DirecTV.
Take the theoretical 850MHz cable system. Such a system could support 140 analog channels at 6Mhz each, but nothing else. In contrast, a completely digital system without any analog channels would support more than 1100 standard digital channels or 400 high-definition channels at full quality. This is exactly what Verizon set out to build with its FiOS TV service.
The FiOS fiber optic infrastructure is designed to support up to 10 GBps. Unlike coax cable providers, which divide their bandwidth between Internet, TV, VOD, PPV, and phone service, Verizon dedicates an optical wavelength on its fiber specifically to 850MHz TV service. This RF overlay at 1550nm provides 3.5Gbps for the FiOS TV service, and is not shared by the Internet, phone, or even video-on-demand.
FiOS TV service uses digital transmission exclusively for its cable channels. There are no analog cable channels on FiOS. Most localities currently require an analog “lifeline” service with local broadcast and public interest channels, so FiOS systems do carry ~15 analog channels for now. If you do the math, that means approximately 790MHz of FiOS TV bandwidth is left for digital channels, enough to carry 1050 standard digital channels, 240-400 high-definition channels at full quality, or more than 500 of DirecTV’s “HDTV Lite” channels.
What about broadband Internet?
With traditional cable Internet from Comcast, Cox, or Time Warner, a ~40Mbps node is shared among 12-24 customers in a neighborhood, and available bandwidth depends in good part on what your neighbors are doing. In contrast, Verizon FiOS bandwidth is essentially dedicated at the local level. It doesn’t matter what your neighbors are doing, your Internet performance remains the same.
FiOS downstream Internet is on completely separate wavelength from TV service — 1490nm — and uses an optical networking technology known as BPON. BPON provides 622Mbps for every 32 customers. Verizon is currently in the process of upgrading to GPON, which will provide 2.4Gbps (2400Mbps) for every 32-64 customer connections. With the upgrade to GPON, FiOS will be able to provide every customer dedicated 75Mbps bandwidth, or “Powerboost” type burst speeds well in excess of 100Mbps. Included with every installation, FiOS provides a high-performance Actiontec router supporting 100Mbps Internet service.
FiOS upstream connections uses another separate optical wavelength — 1310 nm. With the BPON technology used today by FiOS, this delivers 155Mbps of upstream bandwidth for every 32 customers. With Verizon’s upgrade to GPON, upstream is increased from 155Mbps to 622Mbps.