Short clip: Qwest on fiber to the node vs. fiber to the home

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>> Tell us about recent innovations that have been introduced at Qwest.

>> There are any number of things that I could talk about in the business market space. I could talk about our addition of what we call ultra-long haul optical technology. We already operate four nationwide rails of DWDM technology. But now what we've done is we've gone in with a large number of drop points, about 160 or so drop points on a nationwide basis, and that is essentially to fill the demand of what a lot people are seeing in, in terms of increased demands for bandwidth. Now they can actually take a wavelength, a 10 gigabit per second wavelength, as a currency of service. And this is not just between traditional, you know, hosting or internet clearing locations, but in fact available to a very large number of cities. In the consumer space, I would point to our investment in what we call fiber to the node, where we're bringing out the fastest available public internet service in North America -- 20 megabits per second. And we have a plan to increase that to the 30 to 35 megabit per second range shortly.

>> Why choose to go fiber to the node versus fiber to the home?

>> Cindy, that's a question we get asked all the time. And I think it's first and foremost a function of where you operate. A lot of carriers that are pursuing a fiber to the home strategy are in areas where they have predominantly aerial plant. And so the construction costs to the home are much lower than if you basically have to pick up a shovel and dig through people's yards and road -- rosebushes and so on. The question comes up though is, is fundamentally fiber to the node, where we're talking about speeds as I mentioned in the 20, soon to be 30, 35 megabit per second range, in any way a disadvantage against the speeds that you could achieve in fiber. And we don't believe that that's the case. If if we believed there was a shortcoming there for our customers, we wouldn't make that sort of investment. But you look at it from the perspective of high definition TV. Typical high definition TV stream in MPEG 4 is in the 8 megabit per second range. So what we're saying is, with those speeds, you can have three simultaneous streaming high definition events going on, plus have a 10 megabit per second internet experience on top of that. So, you know I think in terms of the information that people are consuming, you know, that pretty much fulfills a need. Should consumer needs be beyond the 35 megabit per second range, we would absolutely move forward and make the investments to bring those speeds higher.

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