Fiber-to-the-home in a competitive era

A belief that fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) will be the best long-term access network solution for providing telecommunications and video entertainment services led to trials in the 1980s of FTTH such as BellSouth's Hunter's Creek trial in 1986 and Heathrow trial in 1989. Although many technical issues were uncovered and resolved as a result of these trials, the industry concluded that cost parity of FTTH with copper solutions was not achievable in the planning horizon. This led to subsequent efforts towards achieving greater sharing or the optical interface such as hybrid fiber coax and fiber-to-the-curb (FTTC), both of which are being deployed in commercial networks today.