Fiber to the Home, FTTH, has been expanding in its deployment significantly over the past five years. At the high end, companies such as Verizon have committed to millions of home to be activated within the next year. In contrast, at the smaller end almost 800 towns and municipalities have actually build, and activated FTTH systems in their own environments. This talk addresses the multiple issues of FTTH, including technical options, services offered, cost analysis and trends, integration with wireless, regulatory and legal aspects. The talk uses several current examples of where these systems are deployed or being deployed. The focus is on what has be to done to achieve success and at the same time what problems may arise and how they can best be addressed. Issues such as franchises, rights of way, pole attachments, content acquisition and predatory pricing from incumbents are discussed.
Terrence P. McGarty
Managing Partner
The Telmarc Group, LLC
Terrence P. McGarty is Managing Partner of The Telmarc Group. He has extensive experience in telecommunications systems, technology, and services for over forty years. Currently McGarty heads The Merton Group, a fiber to the home company in the United States. Merton has recently secured financing from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to deploy broadband to over 100,000 households in rural areas of the northeastern United States. McGarty was also founder, Chairman and CEO of Zephyr Communications, a telecommunications company headquartered in Prague, Czech Republic, with operations in Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Romania, Russia, and Greece. The company is currently one of the largest and successful fiber backbone and IP networks in Central Europe. Prior to that McGarty had started and sold a competitive local telephone company in the US, and was Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of NYNEX Mobile, the largest cellular carrier in the United States in the early 1990s. He was also President of Warner Electronic Home Services, the interactive arm of Warner Cable Television.
McGarty has successfully raised over $200 million for his companies over the past twenty years and has been responsible via Telmarc for fund raising in excess of $500 million for various companies. McGarty holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and has been a Professor at MIT, Columbia University, George Washington University, and the Polytechnic University. McGarty has published two books and over 100 professional papers. McGarty has been in many US Government Advisory roles, most recently as vice Chairman of the Presidential Advisory Committee on the Internet at the National Academy of Sciences and has recently been appointed to the Board of the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference.
