but many Koreans already can. The cost of deploying fiber to the home is declining rapidly. The most likely approach is to extend fibers out in the network to a point where they are "split" into eight, thirty-two, or more distribution fibers to the sub- scriber. This approach economizes on the use of fiber in the network and reduces connection costs at the central office or headend of the provider. The most expensive part of a direct fiber-to-the-home architecture has been the installation of the equipment required at the customer's premises. An optical network unit is needed to convert the light wave into the elec- trical pulses that household telephones and television sets now use. The customer may also have to install a source of standby power since the fiber connection cannot conduct electricity. Like most electronic devices, such equipment is going down in price, which may now be as low as $100 to $200 per subscriber, but installation costs are another story: recent esti- mates put the full cost of installing FTTH in urban areas at as much as $1,100-$1,400 per subscriber.4 More and more large, incumbent U.S. telephone companies are begin- ning to explore the possibility of extending fiber to the home. SBC has tested its FTTH system in Mission Bay, a district of San Francisco. 50 Bell- South began testing its FTTH system in Atlanta and Fort Lauderdale in 2001. At present, Verizon has the most ambitious plans to roll out FTTH The Broadband Revolution Table 8-2. Speeds Required for Various Activities Megabits/second Activity Speed Interactive gaming Video conferencing Web surfing Telecommuting Videostreaming High-definition television Source: Dan Hickey, "Jump into the PON," Communications and Engineering Design (November 2002). by spending $2.5 billion to pass 3 million homes by the end of 2005. 51 BellSouth, Qwest, and SBC are pursuing a less aggressive strategy of ex- tending fiber to neighborhood nodes. Despite this growing interest, FTTH technology had spread to fewer than 20,000 homes and small businesses