This news article about FTTR left me scratching my head. What is the value proposition in adopting this technology?

Given that the article talks about fibering individual rooms in your home, for Gigabit speeds.
I’ve already done it with my own Gigabit PoE switch and Cat 5e to each room.

Assuming that we are taking about a clean slate, that may be something worth considering depending on the cost of equipment and fiber runs, but I don’t see how it’ll be beneficial to existing home installations.

In addition, all the equipment seems to be owned by thr ISP. So you won’t have any real control over network configuration and management in your own home either.

Maybe someone has a better idea of why it would be useful.

The only thing missing in my current setup is 10 Gbps (or 2.5 Gbps) to each room. I can and have installed WiFi over PoE for the rooms already so there is no different from what FTTR purportedly offers. Besides the per-room ONT still needs a power outlet to work.

Cat 5e cabling might be an issue if it can’t run at greater than 1 Gbps speed, but wiring or re-wiring is needed in either situation.

The important thing is that the PoE switch and WiFi is owned and managed by myself, there is no outside party involved if I want to make a configuration change. All the single WiFi SSID and seamless roaming between rooms has nothing to do with FTTR, it is just how WiFi works.

This post has been edited by tcwan: Sep 28 2023, 07:42 PM

Ok, so this is all hypothetical, but let's presume that Fiber <-> Copper Ethernet takes ~1 ms due to going through a switch/ONT.

Within the LAN, the latency woun't be affected enough to make any difference, since the connections will probably end up on the same switch where no media conversion is needed (unless you happen to use UTP for one connection and SFP for another).

For Internet connections, I think the latency would be affected more by routing, firewall & CGNAT (since most of us are still dependent on private IPv4 from the ISP). The additional latency due to media conversion is probably negligible as well.

So to me, the only use case for FTTR is being able to use the same fiber for future bandwidth upgrade beyond 1 Gbps. If that is the case, the difference between regular SFP Ethernet and FTTR seems to boil down to how much $$$ difference there is between the two deployments.

Edit: To add to the point I made, currently with PoE over UTP, we can already go up to 10 Gbps with less deployment issues (no need to have a power socket in the room location). So the window of opportunity for FTTR does not seem to be very large, unless they're targeting 10 Gbps and beyond. As a new technology, it's also competing against Ethernet which has wiped off all other competing standards over the years.

This post has been edited by tcwan: Sep 30 2023, 01:59 PM

Uncladded transparent optical fibers which can hug the walls is probably the main advantage if you didn't already have built-in network wiring.
Retrofitting exising housing without having to hack walls and ceilings may be worthwhile. I can see this replacing wireless mesh APs, since I never liked the idea of having to share spectrum with the uplinks since there are not many official channels available even in 5 GHz. Worse, I can definitely observe multiple high-powered APs blasting 5 GHz SSIDs from my neighbors in my apartment complex, leaving me with even fewer clean channels to work with.

Now for the paranoid tin-foil set, this would mean you're leaking data since there is no cladding to prevent someone from eavesdropping

This post has been edited by tcwan: Oct 9 2023, 11:33 AM