g- nal. At the time this book was being written Marconi was testing its equipment with both Bell South and Verizon Communications, with the latter representing the company formed by the merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE Corporation. Chapter Seven While using a single fiber to serve multiple homes reduces costs, the need to splice subbranches flowing to individual homes adds to the cost of the installation. In addition, fiber to the home must compete with the various flavors of digital subscriber lines that telephone com- panies and competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) are offering, as well as cable modems being offered by CATV operators. Thus, it is diffi- cult to be competitive when one vendor needs to install totally new wiring in the form of fiber to the home while a competitor may be able to offer the services required by a subscriber by simply mailing the subscriber a cable modem or DSL modem for self-installation. Probably the best market for fiber to the home is when a bundled service including telephone, data, and video can be marketed and sold to subscribers. Perhaps recognizing this, Lucent Technologies has demonstrated equipment capable of simultaneously supporting four telephone calls, high-quality digital video, and data transmission at 82 Mbits/s. Lucent equipment requires a dedicated fiber to serve each home, which may not be more costly than using a fiber with splicing to multiple homes. However, Lucent equipment is similar to other opti- cal fiber equipment in that the optical fiber reflects a need for new cabling for all homes other than those under construction or in the planning stage. Since several million new homes and apartments are constructed each year in the United States, it may be possible for a communications carrier to work with builders to offer home buyers the ability to select a bundled service option based on the cabling of optical fiber to the home while the home is under construction. Now that we have an appreciation for some of the competitive issues that make it difficul