Corning is introducing a new line of extremely bendable optical fiber cable based on its
nanoStructures technology platform. The change in physical media might not seem so significant, as the new design allows cabled fiber to be bent around very tight corners with virtually no signal loss. So think about the way signals now are zipped around offices and homes. Coaxial cable (augmented by category 5 wiring for some fiber to customer installs) for homes and category 5 for offices. Up to this point, one reason for those choices is that optical media wouldn't bend enough to be useful as a drop media.
That doesn't alleviate the need for optical-to-electrical conversion, but could allow the conversion right at the end user device instead of some other demarcation point. In most cases it still will make sense to convert optical to electrical at a side of home network interface, for cost reasons alone. But designers will have lots more latitude in high-rise living units, where O/E conversion can be done at some point much closer to a cluster of users.
The advantage there is the network operator's ability to retain the benefits of optical bandwidth far deeper into the customer network, as all copper media carry less bandwidth than optical media does. So driving fiber deeper into a building has the same salutory effect as driving fiber deeper into a neighborhood: there is less bandwidth sharing, and therefore more effective bandwidth available to users.
The net effect is the ability to drive more fiber into customer networks at less cost than before, and to terminate optical networks closer to end users than ever before, at least in high-density settings. That, in turn, provides a boost for fiber to customer deployments in markets with high density housing. Verizon should like that.
