Fiber To The Home, Fiber To The Premises -- gets a huge amount of buzz in some trade rags I read. I'm wondering is anyone has any experience with it, or insights?

As one example, Verizon is (supposedly) spending one billion $US in the next 12 months (and another 2 billion the following 12 months) laying fiber cable in neighborhoods all over their local service areas, mostly the Northeast. Verizon seems hell-bent on turning themselves into an all purpose content provider (to compete with Comcast), with super-fast fiber optics to homes as the backbone of the whole process. I can see Verizon making fiber work as a competing product to Comcast HSI, but changing into a content provider is a big stretch in my opinion.

Sure. It's been around for decades. Phone companies often make noise about this and do trial deployments, but in reality it is just noise to shut up the cable companies.

In Singapore however, they love FTTH!

Korea loves FTTH too. I guess it's possible because the housing density is so high. (Say, a square mile might contain up to 20 apartment blocks, each with about 200-250 apartments on average... so that's maximum 5,000 households in one square mile!) Even more so on the very latest high risers, which go up to 60 floors these days.

Average ADSL speeds are 6-8Mbps, whilst VDSL is either 24Mbps symmetric or 48Mbps down / 8Mbps up. And most of new housing developments come installed with LAN sockets built in (100Mbps).

Truly the centre for ridiculous bandwidth. The problem is, what legitimate/legal uses are there for so much bandwidth? Most people end up using P2P with the newfound speed because there is little else that takes advantage of so much bandwidth.

I've read a huge stumbling block in the US is how to distribute the fiber signals once they get into an apartment building, supposedly it's just being developed (don't know the details). Korea seems to have gotten over that hurdle?

I read that the 'fat pipe' will be used in two ways; the telcos want to start to offering movies on demand (content on demand they call it), and the high bandwidth will serve the equivalent purpose to carry a cable TV system's television video signals right now, only with the ability to be of higher quality. The second way is that operating full time servers will be legit under the T&C (it's not legit with Comcast HSI and most basic home DSL arrangements) and so people will be able to host their own servers. I'm not really sure what will be the intended consequence here.

Terminating fiber is very expensive. So it is more likely in a MDU that they would terminate the fiber into a VDSL DSLAM which could give people maybe 24Mbps service.

I can't remember the name of the startup phone company here in ELP that laid miles and miles of fiber all over the city.

It went bankrupt a few years ago.

And yes, splicing fiber is very expensive, there are very few people here in ELP that do it.

Actually, the Verizon service offers true FTTH.

This will be a deciding factor when it's time for me to buy a house.

Perhaps I should have been a little more specific in my post:

It's more like FTTB (Fiber To The Basement), rather than FTTH. The fiber is terminated in the basement and distributed through the ADSL/VDSL DSLAM, as stimpy said. Or, in the newer apartments, fed into a switch which is wired up to apartments using Ethernet cables.

I'm not personally aware of any "true" FTTH service so far, but for most people, the "FTTB" is enough because it really does give more than enough bandwidth for just about anything you can think of.

For example, ADSL already carries voice and data. VDSL can add video. To my knowledge, DVD-quality video can be pumped through at approx. 1.5Mbps. So unless you have multi-room AVOD, I would have thought that few people would need more than 24Mbps.

But whether the bandwidth is needed or not, I can only watch in envy while I use the 512Kbps DSL connection in the UK, paying more than what people pay in Korea for the symmetric 24Mbps VDSL.