Copper's Hot Makeover Delays Demand for Fiber Investment

By no means does all this souped-up copper take the place that fiber will ultimately occupy—fiber is still the ultimate goal. And by running FTTH, FTTN or FTTC, operators are pushing fiber ever closer to that goal. Superfast copper doesn’t replace fiber—it just fills in the last-mile gap.

Infonetics analyst Jeff Heynen points out that each operator has its own approach. AT&T, for instance, uses last-mile copper to deliver its U-verse service, while Verizon, on the other hand, hopes to leapfrog the competition with its FiOS offering by taking the cost hit and just getting the glass to the house already.

“FTTH will spread over the next decade or so,” Heynen says. “Eventually, fiber will be the endgame.”

Over the past 25 years copper has become 1,000 times faster, according to Alcatel-Lucent. No matter the strategy, operators are discovering a veritable gold mine, if you’ll pardon the pun, in those old copper lines—and with US carriers finally in a position to give cable broadband providers some real competition for video services, no less. One day a company will come along and dig up those 75 million miles of BT cable, but in the meantime copper still has some important work to do.