ll as apartment buildings and offices. Fiber to the Home As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter and reviewed at the end of the previous section, we use the term fiber to the home to refer to the Fiber in the Neighborhood installation of optical fiber by a communications carrier to a specific building, such as a house or an apartment or office building. In this sec- tion we first briefly examine the history of fiber to the home and the reason why its deployment to date has been "underwhelming." Once this is accomplished, we will focus on the one area where fiber to the home represents a practical technology. This area concerns the provision of large buildings and their occupants with the ability to bypass the local telephone company, and, as you might expect, has economics as its dri- ving force. Overview Fiber to the home represents a technology that service providers have experimented with since the 1980s. In spite of several well-publicized trials, FTTH represents a technology which, according to the most opti- mistic forecasts, is not expected to achieve a penetration level of more than 1 percent of all U.S. households until the year 2005 or SO. Fiber to the home (FTTH) represents a technology with a minimum market penetration rate primarily because of economics and competi- tion with other broadband solutions that retain the ability to use the existing twisted-pair and coaxial-cable wiring that flows into several hundred million homes on a worldwide basis. Economics The use of fiber into a home or office that is already constructed requires new cabling to the building. Because of the cost associated with the laying of individual fibers to each building, most FTTH equipment placed in field trials uses splices on a fiber strand to serve four or more homes. One example of such technology is the "deep fiber" equipment from Marconi Communications, which can serve up to four homes with three telephone lines and provides a 25-Mbit/s data channel, analog TV, and a direct broadcast satellite (DBS) digital TV si