Dedicated fiber?

[aanon4]

I was wondering if Sonic (cc: @dane) had any plans to offer dedicated fiber to the home? Right now I understand that each fiber's bandwidth is split between a number of households (it's how GPON works after all). While I'm sure that'll be great, I would be quite interested in having a non-shared fiber and wonder if that'd ever happen and if so, at what cost? I'm guessing this is what Comcast charge $300/month for with their home fiber offering.

Thanks

[dane]

No, we do not have plans for solutions for residential access which are not based upon passive optical networking (PON). Today out platform uses a GPON solution, but the PON technology will evolve, and as a result we expect to be able to meet even the most demanding household needs with PON-based services in the future.

[aanon4]

I don't pretend to understand the technology, but I thought GPON was optically split so a number of customer could be served from the same fiber, so sharing the available bandwidth - yes? I just wondered if Sonic would provide an option where the number of customers on a single fiber was limited to 1? Or do I totally misunderstand how this stuff works?

[dane]

I don't pretend to understand the technology, but I thought GPON was optically split so a number of customer could be served from the same fiber, so sharing the available bandwidth - yes? I just wondered if Sonic would provide an option where the number of customers on a single fiber was limited to 1? Or do I totally misunderstand how this stuff works?

GPON is a technology that passively splits the laser light between typically up to 32 premises, while running a protocol that delivers a total of 2.4Gbps/1.25Gbps of shared capacity. Each customer premise device can deliver up to 1Gbps/1Gbps, so contention is possible. But because the speed is so high, typical usage is either very fast and over quickly (a download or upload), or so small as to be irrelevant (5-10Mbps video streams). We don't find congestion on the PON is an issue for our customers, and you'll see lots of folks posting ~940Mbps (up and down) speed tests quite consistently.

For larger business premises where usage is heavier due to tens, hundreds or even thousands of internet or WAN users, we do provide dedicated connections, generally using Ethernet technology at 1Gbps or at 10Gbps.