When it comes to delivering broadband to your home, optical fiber always provides the most bandwidth. Other broadband technologies today, like cable modem, wireless and DSL, are already struggling to provide bandwidth-heavy services today, let alone those on the horizon. Optical fiber to your home ensures that as more products and services become broadband-enabled, your connection is powerful enough to take it – today and tomorrow. Fiber is hundreds of times faster than other broadband technologies.

Optical fiber is also the most secure transmission medium available -- and in a world where we are able to conduct more and more personal business over the Internet, that security becomes increasingly important.

Decades ago, optical fiber was the solution that made long distance truly economical while simultaneously improving performance. It has been driving deeper and deeper into networks, closer to the final end user, ever since because it continues to offer the same advantages to communications networks: superior performance and smart economics. Optical fiber is robust, as it provides the most bandwidth capacity, today and in the future, compared with any other broadband technology. It is the most secure transmission medium available -- and in a world where we are able to conduct more and more personal business over the Internet, that security will become increasingly important to customers. It is also economical, as optical transmission is ultimately more cost-effective than electronic.

A digital subscriber line, or DSL, uses the same copper wire as traditional telephones. Cable modem provides service through existing hybrid fiber-copper, or HFC, lines. It is important to understand that toth of these transmission media have significantly less bandwidth capability than glass fiber. DSL connections are also more likely to be slowed due to the deterioration of the copper lines, most of which were installed more than 15 years ago. Cable modem subscribers share their bandwidth with other subscribers in the area, which also slows cable modem speeds.

Finally, DSLs and cable modems are typically "asymmetrical" in order to maximize, as much as possible, their more limited bandwidth capabilities. Asymmetrical networks maximize their limited bandwidth capacity by offering faster data rates "downstream" to your home than upstream from your home. So, for example, you can receive e-mails with picture attachments very quickly, but send out your own e-mails with pictures attached much more slowly.

Ultimately, cable modem and ADSL are little more than broadband "bandages," temporary solutions that will ultimately be replaced by optical fiber, which has virtually unlimited bandwidth. Optical fiber is the smart, long-term solution for broadband to your home.

While copper, coaxial and wireless are useful today, optical fiber provides the most robust, secure and cost-effective solution for bringing truly high-speed broadband to individual homes. Optical fiber can manage a significantly higher data rate (bandwidth) over greater distances. Copper, coaxial and wireless are also subject to significant transmission interference in ways that optical fiber is not. All of these technologies offer significantly less transmission security than optical fiber. Optical fiber lines also require significantly less maintenance and have significantly longer lifetimes.

First, the cost of fiber and electronics to the home is far less than many people seem to think, with far superior performance compared to wireless or satellite. Those technologies have serious limitations, such as reliability and security, and in many cases, line-of-sight requirements. In fact, rural telecommunications companies are currently leading all other companies in the U.S. for installing fiber to the home for their customers.

Optical fiber is the fastest communications medium in the world and can readily deliver data at Gigabit speeds. Most FTTH communities are starting with less than that -- 10 megabits per second is a typical offering (and much, much faster than that offered by other broadband technologies) -- to handle their current application needs. However, the beauty of FTTH is that you can scale it up quickly and easily. As new high-bandwidth applications emerge, and they certainly will, your service provider can deliver more speed by removing bandwidth caps or by easily upgrading the electronics.

The applications enabled by fiber to the home can offer truly dramatic improvements in quality of life. Fiber to the home better enables distance learning and telemedicine, effective teleworking, and even distributed computing. It's also critical to deliver the bandwidth for home networking and home entertainment technologies

However, the most exciting aspect of FTTH is not necessarily the tremendous applications already available; it is the applications that will emerge to fill the pipes. Today's applications have grown to completely fill the current pipes provided by cable modem and DSL – with FTTH, our imaginations are the only limitations to how our lives will improve.

Historically, distance learning has been defined as instruction that occurs when the instructor and student -- or students -- are separated by distance or time, or both. Until the last decade or so, this has primarily meant correspondence learning via written materials, audio and video tapes. However, more and more accredited universities and colleges are using the Internet as a classroom medium, using private chat rooms and message boards and streaming media to offer courses to geographically diverse students. Dozens of accredited institutions are offering online degree programs, where most or all of the course work toward a degree is conducted online, and the number of institutions offering distance learning continues to grow annually. Distance learning offers students access to quality education regardless of geography.

Telemedicine is essentially the use of telecommunications technologies for medical diagnosis, patient care and even health-related distance learning. Using telemedicine technologies, a radiologist in Los Angeles can view the MRI of a patient in Chicago in real time, analyze and diagnose based on the findings, video conferencing with specialists in Seattle and Miami simultaneously to discuss patient care. The same Chicago patient could then be treated surgically in her home town by the Miami specialist, who would monitor and direct the surgery via live video feed. Telemedicine offers patients access to quality health care regardless of geography, maintains the viability of the community hospital for patient care, improves access to consultative services for health care practitioners and, one would expect, should ultimately drive down healthcare costs.

In teleworking, the employee works from a home office for either a portion of or all of the work week. He or she maintains a presence in the office electronically -- using phone, Internet, video conferencing. The flexibility offered by teleworking has been shown to improve employee morale, can reduce brick-and-mortar costs for companies, and certainly offers an alternative for commuter traffic gridlock seen in most cities today.

Allows file sharing directly between users. While this is commonly associated with music files, due to the awareness of Napster and similar tools, many types of files, including videos, documents and programs are shared among users worldwide.

Allows users to "donate" a small portion of their computing power online to a large group, essentially creating a super computer. This application has grown very popular in medical and technology fields -- one group is using distributed computing to investigate an Anthrax vaccine, others are applying distributed computing to the search for a cure for cancer. For example, the Intel-United Devices Cancer Research Center has approximately 1.9 million computers participating with 138,000 years of CPU power used so far.

Online gaming can include low-bandwidth applications such as virtual card games or online casinos, but increasingly includes bandwidth-intensive games like massively multi-player online role playing games (MMORPGs). In role playing games, players create a character within a fictional game environment and then, as that character, interact with other players who have done the same. The Internet allows thousands of players to play simultaneously, often within elaborate three-dimensional graphical environments that are at least partially server-hosted. The most popular MMORPGs worldwide each have tens of thousands of registered players, and some boast more than 100,000, all of whom pay for the software and, in most cases, additional online fees.

HDTV is revolutionizing television by dramatically increasing the resolution and clarity of both broadcast video and recorded content such as DVDs. Crystal clarity and a "theater-like" screen format translate to very demanding bandwidth requirements, and are well suited to a FTTH infrastructure which is capable of delivering a multitude of HD channels to the home.

Home monitoring, as it sounds, is the ability to monitor the activity and environment of your home while away. Live data feed, including video and audio, from your home could be viewed privately by you via the Internet. Home automation systems coordinate and control a home's appliances and systems, including lighting, ventilation and security. FTTH will better enable both monitoring and automation control away from home.

Actually, today's applications already are bandwidth-constrained and growing more so every day. The ever-increasing number of broadband applications -- and our increasing frequency of use of those applications – is ultimately driving bandwidth demand to optical fiber, the only medium capable of managing all of it in the long-term.

The need for FTTH is very much rooted in the present. The popular applications being used today -- file sharing, online gaming, voice-over-IP -- demand more bandwidth per second than the majority of Internet users can access. And of course we are already seeing applications that are likely to become just as popular soon, such as high-definition television, video on demand, distance learning and teleworking. For those applications to work effectively and to a performance level that consumers will value, they are going to need a minimum bandwidth of 2 Mb/s and, certainly, much higher speeds than that.