Gigabit Internet to the Home

Bill St. Arnaud, CANARIE, Bill.st.arnaud@canarie.ca

Abstract

One of last great impediments to wide scale and rapid deployment of the
Information Society is the last mile issue.  CANARIE is planning a
research and development program that will define some architectural
options that will allow for early deployment of extreme high speed
Internet access to schools and libraries which it is hoped will then
underpin an architectural framework for high speed Internet access to
the home  - Gigabit Internet to the Home (GITH).  The proposed GITH
strategy calls for the deployment of a third residential network
service operating in parallel with existing telephone and cable
delivery mechanisms and thereby avoiding the regulatory and technical
hurdles of integrating traditional telephone and cable services into
one common delivery mechanism. The divergence of these services rather
than convergence may allow for early and rapid deployment of GITH
perhaps in advance of the currently planned large scale rollouts of
cable modem and xDSL services. Over time the GITH service may also
incorporate voice telephony and cable TV services. Although there are
many research issues that need to be addressed such as scaling,
integrated layer 3 optical services and network management an
economically viable architecture may be possible that incorporates
competitive equal access at both the physical and logical layers, by
using low cost Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) equipment, and
new Internet architectural concepts currently under development in
CANARIEs optical Internet network -CA*net 3.  It is estimated that a
GITH system would cost less than Hybrid Fiber Coax (HFC) systems
currently being deployed and would be marginally more expensive than
xDSL or Cable Modem services. The access bandwidth could scale from as
little as a few megabits per second to a mind boggling several terabits
per second using either individual dedicated fibers, dedicated
wavelengths, logical switched paths or direct statistical multiplexing
in a neighborhood router on a chip called a routing puck. Governments
can play a key role in accelerating the deployment of a GITH network by
requiring service providers who want to provide public funded Internet
service to schools and libraries to deploy at the same time a GITH
network infrastructure that would easily scale to support thousands of
homes with competitive equal access.  The early market pull of GITH
network may be always on applications, multimedia push services, mega
e-mail, DWDM caching, and DVD video applications.