The promise of FTTH builds was enthusiastically embraced at the recent Broadband Communities. In itself, this was no surprise. The language being used to describe it, though, did take an interesting turn.

For years, we have talked about fiber as “the key to broadband.” Then we started inserting the term “high-speed” into the description of broadband. But, there has been considerable consternation among government types on how to define “high-speed broadband.”

What was interesting about this tradeshow, however, was that this battle had seemingly been all but dismissed. The terms “FTTH” and “broadband” were largely removed from the vocabulary. Everything was simply about “Gigabit Speed.”

There was no argument about how to define Gigabit Speed. Nor was there even a question among this group of believers about why we needed Gigabit Speed. Steve Ross, Corporate Editor of Broadband Communities Magazine, went so far as to provide a simplified financial model on how service providers could justify the cost of a gigabit build, focusing on the revenue gained from the build.

At Clearfield, we embrace and support this direction. The foundation of our scalable architecture was based upon the goal of meeting surging bandwidth requirements. Gigabit performance is achieved when everything in the network is connected with fiber. With FieldSmart and FieldShield, fiber can be brought to any part of the network, whether it’s home or antenna, without modification.

It’s nice to speak a language everyone understands.