Essential Install | Habitech
Light up your pitch to
customers with the F-word
Beat the inevitable
data bottleneck by
using the world's
toughest and easiest
to deploy fi bre:
Cleerline's SSF
When mixed with copper, fi bre can boost your cred
and the power and profi tability of your custom design,
says Habitech’s Jonathan Pengilley.
Looming large somewhere near the top of every home
tech bucket list is the desire for unlimited broadband.
To stream or not to stream has become an existential
question for tech-savvy consumers of media from the
cloud. So essential is the bit rate to today’s lifestyles that
estate agents are now adding broadband speeds to
property details, and marking down house prices in low
speed areas. No surprise then that consumers should
be especially interested in the nature and girth of the
nearest fat pipe: as Ant is to Dec, the association of fi bre
technology with super fast broadband is now inextricably
established in the minds of your customers.
Pitch them with multi-room audio or 4K TV and they
may even glaze over. Mention IoT and voice activation
and they’ll sit up, no question. Introduce fi bre and you’re
in business. Your customers won’t understand all the
delicious intricacies of Ethernet or IP networking but they
will appreciate that the fi bre QoS (Quality of Service)
means the whole family doing a lot more stuff more
quickly for a happier low-latency life. Even before Fibre-to-
the-Premises (FTTP) crosses the thresholds of millions of
homes, as it surely will, you can deploy the F-word in your
design presentation and win many new friends.
Mind boggling bandwidth
I have to admit that my unalloyed enthusiasm for fi bre is
not always refl ected in an industry addicted to copper.
I get this but with every new fi bre-enabled innovation,
there are fewer reasons for scepticism. Fibre is a proven
tech with only one direction of travel. These magical
16 | October 2017
little tubes already support much of the world’s internet,
cable television and telephone systems because the
pulses of light they carry can shift massive payloads with
negligible loss and latency over vast distances and are
not susceptible to electro-magnetic interference. The
numbers are mind-boggling. According to the latest Cisco
Visual Networking Index published in June, Global IP
traffi c is set to grow threefold between 2016 and 2021 to
reach an annual run rate of 3.3 Zettabytes. To put this in
perspective, a single Zettabyte is the data capacity of 20
billion Blu-ray discs.
Deploy the fi bre QoS
In the coming age of big data, electrons will no longer
cut it. Fibre is not so much the killer app as the only app.
Sooner than you think, light from a Netfl ix, Amazon or
Google server on the other side of the world will reach
your customer’s TVs unmolested by copper. Until then you
can manage change by taking every opportunity to build
in fi bre when the application demands and when budget
allows. So here’s the rub: now that fi bre enabled nodes
are more plentiful and costs are dropping, turbocharge
the operation of your tried and trusted copper with the
creative introduction of fi bre, sprinkle a little stardust on
your design in the process and maximise your revenue
from the job.
For instance don’t pull copper between fl oors in a
large house; distance is deadly to bandwidth and fatter
CAT 6A is tough to pull. Instead run fi bre between the SFP
ports of a switch on each fl oor as the network backbone