The future of communications is in your bathroom mirror. No, it's not in your deepening laugh lines or the tic that belies your irritation. Need a hint? It lies between your face and that Valium on your cabinet shelves. Give up? It's light reflecting off of coated glass, the principle of fiber optics, the current most promising answer to bandwidth bottlenecks. Also, like your reflection, fiber optics is close, fast, and surprisingly difficult to get a hold of.

A fiber optics primer

Here's a bird's eye view of the technology: Fiber-optic cables are very thin strands of purified, coated glass that carry encoded information. The glass itself is passive, letting pulses of light travel from a source (something like a light bulb) to a receiver (something like your eye) that interprets the incoming information. Throughout the process, light is kept in the glass core by a reflective coating (not unlike your mirror backing) that sheaths the cable.

There are other notable similarities. You'll notice when you move in front of the mirror that there is no lag time in your reflection. Light is very fast, even if it's bouncing around. You'll also notice that even distant reflections are clear (think of sunlight reflecting off of the moon). Light doesn't degrade much over distance.

Fiber optics takes advantage of light's resiliency by beaming coded pulses of light over long distances through highly refined glass cores. Bouncing off the reflective coating of the cable, the pulses can move very rapidly--more than 60 miles without significant degradation or further processing. (By contrast, typical copper cable transmission requires repeaters to be placed on the lines every couple of miles to refresh signals and prevent information loss.)

The idea of using fiber optics for telecommunication seems as obvious as, well, your face in the mirror. In addition to the material advantages listed above, there are the advantages of the fibers themselves being cheaper to manufacture, physically smaller, and lighter than copper cabling. There are other functional advantages: Unlike copper cabling, glass fibers are not subject to electromagnetic interference (EMI), such as that from radios, power lines, and lightning. Moreover, optical signals cannot be remotely detected or tapped without physically (and obviously) tampering with the cable. Then there's the fact that fiber optics is a proven technology, having been used between phone systems for years. As early as 1977, AT&T, General Telephone and Electronics, and Bell Systems were sending live traffic over fiber optic cables. Since then, the use of fiber optics has blossomed.

Around the world in 20 years

So, why is fiber optics now coming into the limelight? And if it's so popular, why isn't it in your home right now? As it turns out, the answer to both questions lies in economics.

Until capital ceases to be a consideration in adopting new technology, existence won't guarantee widespread use. Demand drives the adoption of technologies and perceived benefit drives the demand of consumers. Fiber optics is a case in point. Several experiments of fiber optics to the home have foundered on the shores of demand. Until recently there has been no perceived need for the faster, higher bandwidth connections, particularly when the costs of adoption were relatively high. The earliest such experiment was in Japan beginning in the late 1970s. Banking heavily on broad adoption of HDTV, Japan's Ministry for International Trade and Industry brought service to about 150 homes in 1978. Through a public works project, the Ministry sank about $80 million into its project over several years. Neither market materialized and use of the service was minimal. Projects in Canada in 1981 and France in 1983 saw similar results.

"Customers don't think of it in terms of technology; they think of it in terms of communications," observes Nancy Bevac, public relations director of RCN, the nation's first and largest facilities-based provider of bundled communications services. "They think of [the] bandwidth they want to get their data and services at very fast speeds. How that gets delivered isn't as relevant as their customer experience."

Only today is technology reaching that magical point where the benefits of fiber optics are making its costs tolerable to many businesses and consumers. When cables carried mostly voice traffic, conventional copper wiring was sufficiently fast and capable in most cases; thus, for about 20 years fiber optics has been used primarily used for very high-traffic situations, such as in backbones between telephone and cable companies.

As modern marvels such as HDTV and the Internet have become commonplace, demands for greater speed and bandwidth have soared. Consequently the call for fiber optics to swim out of the telco back rooms into cities and neighborhoods swelled. Meanwhile, on the supplier side, improvements in equipment, cabling, and the ability of fiber optics to carry more signals more quickly have enabled vendors and telcos to offer the technology at increasingly attractive prices.

Critical mass

Most likely you have already been personally involved with these sorts of cost-vs.-adoption issues at least twice, as personal computers and the Internet have infiltrated businesses and homes. For successful technologies, there's a period of early adoption, where investors try to figure out how to use the technology to their benefit and whether those uses are durable. As more uses are developed, the incentive for others to adopt the technology grows. In rare cases, this growth reaches a critical mass where it becomes unprofitable for companies (and even uncomfortable for individuals) not to hop on the train.

Most new technologies never achieve that critical mass, of course. Causes of downfall are almost as various as the technologies themselves, but common killers are competition, high cost, lack of clear applicability or compatibility, and good old-fashioned consumer conservatism.

Fiber optic suffers to some degree from all of these. The drive for expansion of fiber optics to the desktop is based less in the incumbent technology's failure than in the new technology's greater potential, and will be as long as metal-based communications options are sufficient. In fact, other communications options haven't withered and died as fiber optics have crawled out.

Cable and DSL connections are two examples of ways by which copper is being leveraged to meet higher demands for moving fast, bandwidth-intensive data. Of course, using the existing infrastructure has strong financial incentives that increase as it becomes more expensive to string lines to remote locations or in sparsely populated areas. In these cases, too, where there is less information traveling over existing lines, there's likely to be less perceived need by consumers for a bandwidth upgrade.

Peter Bartram, CEO of national ISP Imagine.com explains, "There's always going to be places where it just doesn't make sense to run fiber. In those cases, they'll either use the existing cable or some sort of wireless. There's a lot of copper in the ground and as a result people are always trying to figure out ways to make it more efficient. That's what DSL is all about."

Wireless technologies, too, are a viable alternative and might prove to be the alternative in remote, sparsely populated areas where the material costs of getting any cabling to the farm are extreme. Brazil, the second largest potential wireless market in the Western Hemisphere, is a case in point. A landline penetration rate of less than 20 percent--unequal to meeting the growth of communications demands--has created a vacuum into which communications megaliths such as Nextel and BellSouth have been drawn, along with a diverse group of telecom operators from around the globe.

"There are wireless technologies that people are saying will be the solution to the last mile," notes Stacey Yates, director of market research at KMI, a fiber-optics market research firm. "Some companies are doing fiber to the home. It's capital intensive, so it's going to be slow. If people want bandwidth now, there are going to be cheaper and faster solutions."

Then, too, there's the small matter of consumer confidence. Although fiber-optics technology is worming its way into the public psyche, its relative newness and the fact that options for buying, selling, and using fiber optics aren't as versatile as long-established systems makes the technology less attractive to many potential consumers.

Bartram observes, "You're always going to have the early adopters and the innovators, then the mainstream and the laggards. And that's happening in a corporate environment, too. So, that's a psychology issue of the corporate culture."

Companies like Tenor Networks of Acton, Mass., are working to address the latter issue. In part because there is no mainstream technology that allows service providers or customers to read packets sent over fiber optics lines, wholesale service providers can sell only whole pipes to their customers, no matter what amount or level of bandwidth those retail service providers need. This contributes to higher end-user costs.

Tenor Networks' product, an optical service switch that enables the creation of differentiated services for optical backbones, helps fill those holes and it brings optical networks one step closer to matching the service capabilities of conventional networks. Susan Ursch, director of public relations at Tenor Networks, says "Today the level of service doesn't exist in data networks that does in phone networks. You can call the phone company and, as a user, you're looking for a lot of various services that are in place. We're looking to help the service provider do the same thing [with optical networks]."

It is at the building level where fiber-optics technology is facing its greatest challenges. Economies of scale have driven fiber optics part way into some neighborhoods and office parks, but cabling the last mile, that expensive physical interval between telco and end user where each line subdivision taps into a smaller revenue pool, is proving to be a sticky problem. Today slightly more than 10 percent of businesses and households use fiber optics to go online, although that percentage is rising.

"If you want to have fiber into the house, it gets more expensive because you have to run fiber from the pole into the house," explains Bertram. "The corporations are the ones that can afford to bring fiber into the building. The fortune 500 companies might be paying a hundred grand a pop there."

Not surprisingly, neighborhoods where copper cabling is firmly entrenched can be especially tough nuts for fiber optics-based service providers to crack. New developments requiring new line installations and densely populated areas offer more attractive targets.

For example, RCN, a telecommunications service company installing fiber optics a scant 900 feet from many homes in Massachusetts, is turning Boston area's peas-in-a-pod density to its advantage.

RCN's Bevac explains: "We pick our markets carefully and go into markets where the density is about 150 homes per mile. When we run our network through there, it's pretty close to a lot of homes. We're doing it cost effectively compared to a cable or phone company that has to provide service to everybody."

Although RCN anticipates increasing demand for high bandwidth applications, its profitability model is tied to heavy demand for existing services and, more importantly, demand for bundled services. This bundling approach, tying cable TV, phone, and Internet services into a single high capacity line, is a competency that might be a bellwether for future telco service offerings. In RCN's case, penetration of voice services jumped from 8 to 38 percent in the same market after bundling was offered, and data (Internet) penetration tripled. Of course, convenience, rather than customers' cravings for fiber optics, feeds RCN's popularity; but the company's fiber optic lines underpin its ability to offer service bundles.

Bevac observes, "Especially when customers are changing to sign up with us for multiple services, they're looking for more bang for the buck. They also want not to have to think of all these things. They want somebody to take care of them with one single bill."

Enlightenment

Given existing trends, you don't need a magic mirror to see the future of fiber optics: It looks like increased distribution, improved service offerings, broader applications, and lower costs.

Like begets like when it comes to technology. End-users spoiled by fast office connections will look for economical ways to get similar performance at home. Meanwhile, services and applications providers will develop more offerings for the fast-connection crowd. More offerings will make fast connection still more compelling--maybe even worth a few bucks more per month--for consumers, although even conservative customers shouldn't have to wait long for costs to drop to competitive levels.

Already companies such as Cogent Communications are offering fiber optic connections more than 100 times faster than a T-1 at lower prices. For the residential market RCN, Media One and other multi-service providers bundle a near-T1 fiber optics line with Internet connection and cable TV for less than $40 per month. Are these bargains? Only compared to today's market.

So, the next time you're in the bathroom, take a good look in the mirror. It's not just your face that's there. It's television-quality videophones; live distance learning; disposable, just-in-time software; network-centric computing; and much much more.

Contributing Editor Cass Brewer is a Web developer for Boston-based Art Technology Group.