The Fiber Optic Fantasy Slips Away. The market for fiber network access seems to have been an important common ingredient in the epidemic of accounting fiascos that have been bursting out all over lately. [The New York Times: Technology]

This article is looking at the issue of long distance Fiber Optic Cable (FOC hereafter)

The biggest issue that stopped the adoption of FOC as a market leader in telecommunications was the last mile. By having local telcos that refused to update their switching station, or have the services that would require such a  change in hardware, they had no motivation to standardize on the very sytem that would have driven the cost of it down.

Market: Switching hardware that can handle heavy weather to be mounted on the outside of peoples homes in order to serve their data needs (television, telephone, internet.) Make sure the box is addressable so that you can roll services on or off at that location, dropping the amount of hardware that you need to have in the switching station that is serving the area. By having reasonably intelligent slave units at each household, you can offer the service to early adopters to start, giving movies on demand, fat bandwidth and lower telephone call rates as the user is now on your integrated system.  This in turn lightens the role of the central server in the switching station to little more than multiplexer that does i/o feeds.

Get rid of set top boxes by having the slave handle those duties, with a small IR sensor that connects to the new slave's lan via a feed from a sensor that is an inline connector to the coaxial cable. A custom remote is a part of the package deal that can then address the slave via the IR feed. The custom remote opens up to reveal a small keyboard (much like the Nokia communicator cellphone) This breaks people of the hotbox issue, as everything is handles securely form outside their homes, with all transaction approvals occuring outside the users ability to influence.

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