The Newsletter of the Fiber Optic Association
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
The Newsletter of The Fiber Optic Association Looking for information on a particular topic? Use the FOA's Google Custom Search to search the FOA website and all back issues of the FOA Newsletter. May, 2016 Join The FOA eMail Newsletter List Want to be notified about jobs, special events or when the FOA Newsletter is updated? Sign up for the FOA eMail Newsletter. Time To Renew Your FOA Membership/CFOT? You can now renew with PayPal SmartGigabit City Meeting Comes To The Bay Area - June 27/28, 2016 Contractors And Installers Take Note - YOU Should Be There! More. Don't Miss These Other Events, Seminars and Webinars There is a large number of interesting questions asked this month! In This Issue - (INDEX) Click on "RETURN TO INDEX " after each section to FOA Newsletter - Features return you to this INDEX so you can find things The Newsletter of The Fiber Optic Association.html[7/11/2016 2:21:45 PM] The Newsletter of The Fiber Optic Association easier. By The Numbers Features Sometimes we find ourselves analyzing numbers we find and getting some insights to our markets. Here's a few numbers that interested us this month. If you are a service provider or an organization considering How Much Is A Broadband Subscriber Worth? building FTTH, this will be especially interesting reading. How Much Revenue Does FTTH Generate? How Big Are CATV Companies/ISPs? Where Does Google Fit In? Cutting The Cost Of Transceivers By 90% How Much Is A Broadband Subscriber Worth? A Second Look SmartGigabitCity Comes To The Bay Area Lennie & Ted Guides Updated, Now At FOA What something is worth is determined by what someone is willing to pay for it. That's question that has come Older Fiber - How good Is It? up from potential builders and financiers of systems - what is a broadband subscriber worth in today's market? Product Reviews - Fiber Tools and Testers While we're not aware of any broadband systems being sold, we have had CATV systems being bought, Cleaning Expanded Beam Connectors including the Charter purchase of Time Warner Cable and Bright House that was approved recently. Here are Fiber Optic Fashion the numbers for those deals: Charter paid $56.7 billion for Time Warner Cable which has 10.8 million CATV subscribers and 12.7 million Don't miss the interesting questions asked this Internet subscribers - that's $5250 per subscriber for TV and $4465 per Internet-only subscriber. month! Charter paid $10.4 billion for Bright House which has 2.1 million subscribers, or $4950 per subscriber. More.... Jobs That's comparable to the price the European company Altice paid for Cablevision ($5000/subscriber) and OLANs - Optical LANs Suddenlink ($6000) last year, as reported in the FOA Newsletter in September. It's also twice what AT&T paid OTDRs - more info for satellite provider Direct TV which lacks the capability of providing high speed Internet. OSP Civil Works More to read in Worth Reading and Q&A In the CATV industry, big companies are called an "MSO" which means "Multiple System Operator."* That term comes from how they were started - companies with the financial backing purchased lots of individual CATV companies that had been started in many small towns with limited service areas. Companies with Sections lesser amounts of money would build these systems in small towns and sell them at a profit to the big MSOs. The MSOs would pay several times what it cost to build the system based on the long term earnings from New @ FOA operating the system. Fiber U - free online self-study courses Publications: FOA Textbooks, NECA/FOA 301 We have not seem a similar business model develop in FTTH or broadband networks yet, but it certainly looks Installation, eBooks feasible. There is certainly some profit to be made by creating small FTTH networks and selling them if the More "Quickstart Guides" - OTDRs prices per subscriber are similar to what CATV companies are paying per subscriber. : New FOA YouTube Videos Online Reference Guide: Many new pages Even if we don't see FTTH MSOs, the market price for a subscriber (at 5X or more what it costs to build the Tech Topics: More online information network) should make bankers happy to invest in FTTH networks. Certification: New FOA OSP Certification FOA Schools: New schools and programs *MSO has recently also been used to mean "Multiple Services Operator" for companies that offer multiple services like TV, phone and Internet access. Events: Webinars, Conferences and Shows of Interest To Fiber Techs Webinars: Online seminars on useful topics How Much Revenue Does FTTH Generate? Q&A: What you are asking the FOA? The value of a FTTH subscriber depends on the projected revenue from them. There are some numbers on Product News - New stuff that from Verizon's FiOS system. As of last summer, before Verizon sold off some of its FiOS systems in CA Worth Reading: News from around the world and FL, FiOS had about 7 million subscribers and generated $3.4 billion revenue, up 10% over the year FTTH before. That's about $485/year or $40/month. How much profit that provides is pure speculation, but we know Download This - Good applications material online that FTTH and FiOS in particular is very low maintenance. FiOS FTTH maintenance is so low that Verizon The Newsletter of The Fiber Optic Association.html[7/11/2016 2:21:45 PM] The Newsletter of The Fiber Optic Association FiOS converts copper landline customers for free to rid themselves of the maintenance problems of copper - DIG SAFE - Call 811 before you dig! 100,000 of them in the first half of 2105 alone. (Reference) Many Verizon FiOS customers pay for premium service to get higher speeds. 64% pay for >50Mb/s and 23% Jobs pay for >75Mb/s. Since they are all connected on the same hardware (GPON), the higher speed doesn't cost the provider more, it's just allocating bandwidth. Jobs- Current openings for Cable Techs, Fiber Splicers, etc. Also see FOA Jobs Web Page and FOA on How Big Are The CATV/Internet Companies? Where Does Google Fit In? The FOA Jobs Web Page has been updated and a After the Charter/Time Warner Cable/Bright House merger analyzed above, the combined subscribers will new page added on Using your FOA total almost 20 million. Comcast, the largest cable and Internet provider in the US has 22 million subscribers. Training/Certification to Find the Right Job in Fiber AT&T has about 16 million Internet subscribers. Verizon has about 7 million FiOS customers. Optics Google is only getting started, of course, but they have announced - surprise! - that Google Fiber is no longer Where Are The Jobs In Fiber Optics? FOA talks a hobby. In the February 2014 FOA Newsletter we analyzed the cities that Google Fiber had announced and about all the applications for fiber optics, what jobs showed the total market was about 22.5 million people. In the April Newsletter, we estimated that those areas involve and the qualifications for the workers in the could produce over 5 million subscribers. field in this YouTube video. Since 2014, Google Fiber has expressed interest in a number of new areas, as shown in the map below from their blog. Join The FOA eMail Newsletter List Want to be notified when the FOA Newsletter is updated? Sign up for the FOA eMail Newsletter. You can also sign up from your cell phone: text "FOA" to 22828 (usual text msg charges apply) CFOT Renewals Renew your FOA certification online - plus get a discount on the new FOA books and an extra month free. Details here. The Archives: Past Issues. Use these links to read past issues or use FOA's Google Custom Search to look for specific topics on our website. 1/16, 2/16, 3/16, 4/16 1/15, 2/15, 3/15, 4/15, 5/15, 6/15, 7/15, 8/15, 9/15 , If we estimate the population of those areas, we get this: 10/15, 11/15 , 12/15 Kansas City 2 million 1/14, 2/14, 3/14, 4/14, 5/14, 6/14, 7/14, 8/14, 9/14, Austin 1.8 10/14, 11/14, 12/14 Provo/Salt Lake City 1.1 1/13, 2/13, 3/13, 4/13, 5/13, 6/13, 7/13, 8/13, 9/13, San Jose/Sunnyvale 1.8 10/13, 11/13, 12/13 Portland 2.3 1/12 , 2/12, 3/12, 4/12, 6/12, 7/12, 8/12, 9/12, 10/12, Phoenix 4.3 11/12, 12/12 San Antonio 2.3 1/11 , 2/11, 3/11, 4/11, 6/11, 7/11, 8/11, 9/11, Nashville 1.7 The Newsletter of The Fiber Optic Association.html[7/11/2016 2:21:45 PM] The Newsletter of The Fiber Optic Association 10/11, 11/11, 12/11, Atlanta 5.5 1/10 , 2/10, 3/10, 4/10, 05/10, 07/10, 08/10, Charlotte 2.3 09/10, 10/10, 11/10 Raleigh-Durham 1.2 1/09 , 2/09, 3/09, 04/09, 05/09, 07/09, 08/09, Tampa 2.9 09/09, 10/09, 11/09, 12/09 Louisville 1.3 1/08 , 2/08, 3/08, 4/08, 5/08, 6/08, 7/08, 8/08, Los Angeles 13.2 09/08, 10/08, 11/08, 12/08 Irvine/Orange County 1 12/07 , 11/07, 10/07, 09/07, 08/07, 07/07, 06/07, San Diego 3.2 05/07, 04/07, 03/07, 2/07, 1/07 Chicago 9.9 12/06 , 11/06, 10/06, 09/06, 8/06, 7/06, 6/06, 5/06, Total 57.8 million (or about 20-25 million households) 4/06, 3/06, 2/06, 1/06, 12/05 ,11/05, 10/05, 09/05, 08/05, 07/05, 6/05, 5/05, That's 3 times what we estimated for the cities announced in 2014, and following a similar analysis, this could 4/05, 2/05, 01/05, make Google Fiber a $10-15 billion/year or bigger business and add them to the top tier of broadband 12/04 , 10/04, 9/04, 8/04, 7/04, 6/04, 5/04, 4/04, providers.