Are you getting enough fiber in your diet?

FAQ: Verizon's fiber network (FiOS) sounds advanced. Won't that give them a tremendous advantage going forward?

When a carrier digs up the neighborhood and brings a fiber optic connection directly to you, that is known as FTTP (or, Fiber to the Premises). It is a great thing for the consumer and I doubt that many people would say otherwise.

However, Verizon is spending a boat load of money to dig up those sidewalks and driveways - if memory serves me right -- $18 Billion. So another question might be this: does the customer get something so great that it justifies the expense?

AT&T and most cable companies have an alternative strategy. It is called FTTN (or, Fiber to the Node). You can think of a node as roughly a neighborhood. But when deployed this way, the average home is likely less than ¼ of a mile away from the fiber backbone. It should be noted that AT&T is doing some FTTP buildouts, but only in selected areas and mostly in new residential neighborhoods. When all is said and done, maybe 1 Million homes out of 19 Million total will be FTTP; the rest will be FTTN.

Let's look at what all that bandwidth (real or perceived) gets you. Consider a high-end home in the future - maybe four or five years out. Inside are eight high-definition TVs, four cable modems and four voice adapters. If all of the HD displays were on, and all of the cable modems were streaming video, and all of the voice adapters were handling calls, you still only get to about 72 Mbps, needed by that house. ("Only.")

Think about that, the next time someone dangles 100 Mbps in front of your nose. In my estimation, the Verizon gambit will look very shrew only if some new, futuristic, bandwidth hog applications come online. Maybe Virtual Reality to the Home?

If I had a choice of FTTP or FTTN, I'd pick the all-fiber route. But if you ask me to cover the capital expenses involved, for now, I'll pick FTTN.