Full-Service Network (FSN)

Definition
The full- service network (FSN) is a telecommunications infrastructure capable of
providing all of today's known telecommunications applications as well as laying
the foundation for future applications. This definition does not imply that the
infrastructure is owned by one entity or that only one medium carries all
applications.

Overview
Integration of telephony, data, and video services into a unified network has been
a topic of intense study and discussion by system planners in the 1990s. The
Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the resulting push toward deregulation has
only intensified the planners' quest for full-service network solutions. In this
light, operators are implementing and investigating multiple network options,
including wireless, hybrid fiber/coax (HFC), and fiber-to-the-curb. To date, the
major focus has been implementing the FSN in urban environments. This tutorial
reviews the FSN as deployed in a rural setting.
In the context of this tutorial, only that part of the FSN from the central office
(CO) or headend to the subscriber is considered. As such, the interoffice and
backbone facilities required to implement the FSN are not considered.
Additionally, this tutorial looks at the FSN from primarily the independent telcos'
perspective, although the same issues and principles apply to other local- loop
providers, such as cable-television (CATV) operators or RBOCs. Furthermore, the
scope is on that part of the local- loop required to service rural portions of North
America; specifically, the focus is on those areas with fewer than 20 homes per
mile.

Topics
1. Rural Market Characteristics
2. Population Shifts and Changed Expectations
3. Rural versus Urban Telephony
4. Rural FSN Architectures
5. HFC Network for Rural Applications

6. A Fiber System for the Rural FSN

7. Wireless Access to the Rural FSN
8. High-Speed Digital Access in the Rural FSN
9. Conclusion
Self-Test
Correct Answers
Glossary

1. Rural Market Characteristics

The whole product1 concept is depicted in Figure 1.
Figure 1. The Whole Product Concept

With this model, the generic product is considered to encompass the basic
requirementssuch as features and form factorthat the customer associates
with the tangible product. The expected product tends to be the intangibles, such
as expected reliability, service expectations, and feature enhancements as
compared to the generic product. The augmented product describes those things
that differentiate the expected product from competitors' offerings. The
augmented product consists of intangible things such as enhanced customer
service, as well as tangible things, such as features not offered by the competition.
The potential product provides the consumer with a glimpse of the future by
offering a view of tomorrow's augmented and even expected product.
Applying the whole product model to the rural telephone operator, the generic
product is dial tone. That is, plain old telephone service (POTS) is the basic
product associated with the rural telephone-operating company. Along with the
1The whole product concept is described in Chris Halliwell's course, "Strategic Marketing of Technology Products,"
California Institute of TechnologyIndustrial Relations Center, Pasadena, California.

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generic product are expectations consumers have for lifeline service, flat-fee local
calls, standardized consumer premise equipment (CPE), and a certain level of
modem connectivity. The augmented product represents services beyond the
expected offering, such as ISDN, long-distance, and CATV services. The potential
product includes services and features that include video-on-demand, high-speed
Internet access, and one-stop billing (see Figure 2).
Figure 2. The Whole Product ConceptA Rural Telco
Perspective

The requirements for a whole product are changing as a result of a shift in

customer expectations and the movement of people and organizations from the
city to the country.

2. Population Shifts and Changed

Expectations
The population shift from city to country has resulted from several factors. One of
these factors is a result of the productivity strides made in the manufacturing
sector, reducing the percentage of the population working in directmanufacturing jobs. The resulting growth of the service industry is allowing
workers more freedom in where they work and live.
Another reason for the shift from city to country is the growth of second homes
for people whose main dwelling is in the city. The lower-cost infrastructure,
ranging from real estate to taxes, has given both businesses and individuals
another incentive to move to the country. Lastly, the improvements in both

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telecommunications and computer technology allow these businesses and

individuals to reap the benefits of the lower infrastructure costs.
The expectations of people who move to the country have been set by their
experience in the city (Figure 3). That is, they expect the same services, such as
caller ID, call waiting, ISDN, etc., of the rural telephone companies. Additionally,
those people in the country have had their level-of-service expectations raised by
the national media, both print and television, as the hype of the World Wide Web
is ubiquitous.
Figure 3. The New Whole ProductA Rural Telco Perspective

Customers in rural areas now expect the same level of service as those people in
the city. The operator of the local loop has three basic options in terms of
providing FSN capability. Simply put, the operator can own, rent, or wholesale
part of the entire network.
For instance, the operator can build or own the entire network. This provides the
ultimate in control, with regard to pricing, introduction of new services, and
leveraging ones brand name. This implies that the operator has or acquires the
skills to operate and market the network and its associated services.
The operators need not own the entire network, however, as they can rent
facilities from other entities and resell under their brand name. This reduces the
investment and spreads the risk associated with the introduction of new services.
With this approach, the operators still get the benefit of using their brand name
to market and sell network services.
Finally, operators can simply resell transmission or network services to a third
party and act as a wholesaler. Operators need not create the infrastructure
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required for selling, servicing, training, and marketing the new services. By
reselling part of the network, the operator effectively shares the risk between
wholesaler and retailer. This approach allows the operator to use the marketing
resources of the retailer to reach the end customers.
Operators are mixing all of the above approaches to create full-service networks.
The particular arrangement chosen by an operator depends on the given
circumstances. For instance, to provide Internet access, the operator may partner
with a local Internet service provider (ISP) and simply resell the ISP's service. On
another level, the operator may provide signal transport or trunking services for a
third party, such as a CATV provider, and be completely transparent to the end
customer.

3. Rural versus Urban Telephony

The characteristics of rural telephony or cable providers are quite different from
those in an urban environment. Some of the reasons for the unique
characteristics of rural operators include facilities, staffing, and service needs.
These differences result from a much lowerdensity environment than found in
an urban locale. Exchanges, instead of serving tens of thousands, often serve
populations measuring in the hundreds.
Like urban environments, the local loop is straining under the demands of new
services and often has insufficient capacity. The local loop often has an aging
copper plant with analog pairgain devices, incapable of providing today's digitalservice requirements. Unlike urban areas, the loop distances between the CO and
subscribers are often measured in miles, rather than feet. Integration of
exchanges, resulting from purchases, mergers, and swaps, is a necessity. Finally,
trials of new technology are often impractical, as the sizes of the operations do
not justify the cost of a trial.
The staffing for rural operations reflects the number of customers served. Some
of the smaller operations have less than five people for the entire company! The
engineering staff typically consists of a generalist whose knowledge includes both
the CO and outside plant. Similarly, the maintenance and operations craft are not
specialists and often work on both electronics and outside-plant facilities.
The service needs of rural operations are not homogenous. The requirements for
a subscriber outside of Oran, Iowa will probably be different from those of a
telecommuter on the outskirts of Aspen, Colorado. As with any local-access
network, growth can occur anywhere along the loop. The key difference with a
rural local loop is that the growth can occur anywhere along a loop measured in
miles, rather than kilofeet. In other words, it is much more difficult to predict
growth. Once established, however, the customers tend to be primarily low
churn.
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To leverage the operators' minimal staffing, a rural full-service network requires

a local-loop architecture that is simple to plan, learn, install, provision, and
maintain. Similarly, it must be reliable and, if possible, redundant to minimize
staffing requirements for maintenance and repairs. Reliability is also required to
provide the lifeline service customers expect.
The network must be flexible, as the required services could include everything
from POTS to Internet to video. As much as possible, the network should use the
existing facilities to gain the benefit of existing craft knowledge as well as to
reduce total system investment. Lastly, it must accommodate possible growth
anywhere in the service area.

4. Rural FSN Architectures

In an ideal world, the network provider could start from a clean infrastructure
slate and would deploy fiber as deep in the network as economically possible.
This would be the most desirable approach to the rural FSN, as fiber provides the
most bandwidth potential of any medium, yielding the most flexible growth path
for future system expansion and services. The process for deploying fiber,
however, is lengthy and a major investment.
Thus, the rural FSN must, if possible, reuse the existing infrastructure consisting
of copper, twisted pair for telephony, and coaxial cable for video services. In some
cases, a wireless infrastructure provides either the quickest or most economical
method of delivering either telephony or video services.
Table 1 shows the cost of fiber onlythe cost of installation or splicing is not
includedas a function of distance. The figures shown in Table 1 represent the
lower end of fiber costs. Factors affecting fiber costs include whether the fiber is
housed in aerial or buried-type of cable. Rural areas can easily exceed 5 and 10
miles, so clearly there is a huge economic benefit to equipment that can operate
using fewer fibers.
Table 1. Material Cost of Fiber for Various Sheath Counts versus
Distance
Distance (miles)
6 Fiber
12 Fiber 24 Fiber 48 Fiber
2

$5,808

$8,976

$12,672

$16,368

$14,520

$22,240

$31,680

$40,920

10

$29,040

$44,880

$63,360

$81,840

For urban or small-town applications, the cost of fiber is less as a result of the
shorter distances between the CO and subscribers and more easily amortized
because of the larger number of subscribers. On a per-line basis, the cost of fiber

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is not the dominant part of the network. As a result, products built for that
market tend to be fiber-rich, and the network is often overbuilt.
What is the cost of overbuild? In the copper world, because every telephone
needs a twisted-pair termination and because planners do not know where the
next new service is going to be needed, the tendency has been to put in two or
even three times the amount of distribution copper needed. The result is a treeand-branch network with tapered cables (see Figure 4). As the cost per pair for
copper is not that high, it was not a really big cost.
Figure 4. Tree-and-Branch Fiber Distribution

A new fiber network tends to look just like a copper network. Instead of every
telephone needing a pair, every optical network unit needs a fiber pair. As
planners still do not know where they are going to need an ONU, the result is that
the cables are still tapered, and the network is still overbuilt. Now, however, the
cost for the overbuild is much higher. In fact, the situation is worse, because
planners must accommodate both unexpected growth in subscribers and
unexpected bandwidth demands from their existing subscribers.

5. HFC Network for Rural Applications

For HFC, the broadband-transport system must be installed prior to any service
activation. For rural applications, the HFCover-coax approach is generally too
costly, as evidenced by the fact that coaxial cable for video transport is not in the
rural areas because of the high cost (see Figure 5). The number of television
households not passed by a CATV system is approximately 4 percent or 4 million
homesa significant amount.

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Figure 5. Typical Network for Telephony over HFC

In some cases, there may be a high enough concentration of passings to justify

the construction of a miniature HFC infrastructure. In these instances, the
telephony system justifies bringing fiber to a location where it would not be
justified on a video-only basis. Video services are added only to those ONU
locations that can effectively amortize the cost of video optoelectronics and
coaxial network. Telephony services are provided over separate fiber and copper
facilities (see Figure 6).
Figure 6. Selective Addition of HFC Capability to the FiberBased Rural FSN

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6. A Fiber System for the Rural FSN

A fiber-based system that uses a counter-rotating ring to distribute bandwidth
around the ring is depicted in Figure 7. In this case, bandwidth is accessed at
optical network units (ONUs) and ranges from POTS to tier-1 (T1) service.
Because it uses a counter-rotating ring, only two fibers are required per ring (four
fibers required, if both rings are in the same sheath). This minimizes the amount
of outside-plant fiber.
Figure 7. Characteristics of a Fiber System for the Rural FSN

At the CO, the switch interface, the time-slot assigner, the multiplexing function,
and the interface to fiber are all accomplished in a single terminal. On the field
side, the fiber optics is converted to line cards and interfaced to drops in a single
terminal. Because there is a minimum of conversions and a minimum of
elements, this is a very simple network to troubleshoot. Rings are also naturally
very easy to troubleshoot and to maintain. As bandwidth is everywhere on the
ring, ONUs may be added only when and where required, allowing deployment of
assets to match closely their associated revenues.
Because the signal is repeated at each ONU, the possible range with this
architecture is enormous and makes it ideal for rural routes. Up to 30 ONUs can
be distributed without exceeding delay and jitter requirements of the network.
One of the best attributes of a ring configuration is that it allows route diversity
and therefore is immune to cable cuts. Most importantly, this sort of system
brings fiber further into the loop, positioning the network for future
telecommunications systems.
The fiber system must accommodate the existing copper network. Besides the
need to serve the subscribers' copper drops from the ONU, the fiber system must
either allow copper extensions to remote terminals or copper ONUs, both from
the CO and from ONUs. In the latter case, the fiber system replaces the need for
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repeated copper associated with T1 signals. A copper-fed ONU does not have
enough bandwidth for broadcast video. Also, a copper network is not always
available, so the system must be able to interface to microwave or radio systems
as well.

7. Wireless Access to the Rural FSN

The rural full-service network must also support wireless-telephony access. This
is required not only for cellular and PCS needs but for providing an alternative to
copper for customer drops. In extremely rural areas, wireless is sometimes the
only cost-effective method of providing telephony services.
Multichannel multipoint distribution system (MMDS) is a wireless method some
operators use to provide video services to rural customers. MMDS is
complementary to the fiber/copper network and gives the rural operator another
way of providing all of the services demanded from a full-service network. Local
multipoint distribution system is a refinement of MMDS, utilizing higher
frequencies whose exact allocation will soon be determined by the FCC.
Direct broadcast satellite (DBS), otherwise known as direct to home (DTH),
provides another wireless method for the rural operator to distribute video
services. For instance, approximately 50 percent of the members of National
Rural Telephone Cooperative market the DirectTV, DBS service. Many of these
companies have both HFC and MMDS interests, as well. As with MMDS, it is a
wireless-broadcast solution, which means low up-front costs for the operator (see
Figure 8). Unlike an HFC system, costs are mostly associated with each
subscriber and not on an up-front, per-passing basis.
Figure 8. Mixed Fiber
DBS Systems for the Rural FSN

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8. High-Speed Digital Access in the Rural

FSN
Deployment of distributed bandwidth on a fiber backbone provides the basis for
migration for high-speed Internet, data, or switched digital video access. This
scenario assumes the use of the existing fiber and copper infrastructure:
infrastructure justified on basic telephony services. An overriding assumption is
that broadcast video is served by some other previously described technique,
such as HFC, MMDS, or DBS.
A simplified view of the network and the three major new elements that are
required to implement a shared data service are shown in Figure 9. These basic
elements are as follows:

routing or distributed switching at the ONU

solutions for high-speed copper (e.g., xDSL) from the ONU to the NID
(Note that the solution for high-speed copper should be scalable. In
other words, system bandwidth may be traded for distance.)

a network interface device (NID) at the home to convert the high-speed

copper-format signals to a format compatible with CPE

Figure 9. Elements Enabling High

Speed Digital Access in the
Rural FSN

The appeal of this approach is that it utilizes the existing outside plant
infrastructure, CPE, and it deloads the switch of Internet traffic. Essentially, the
ONU becomes a distributed digital subscriber line access multiplexer (DSLAM).
High-speed access is only provided to those subscribers who are willing to pay for
the service.

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9. Conclusion
In summary, the service expectations of the rural FSN, although much more
difficult to meet, are pretty much the same as those in urban areas. The operators
in rural areas face unique challenges, such as longer, less-dense loops; thinly
staffed operations; and varying service needs. There are a number of methods of
providing FSN capabilities, and there is no single correct implementation. The
only right rural FSN is the one that makes the most profit.

Self-Test
1. The FSN utilizes a single medium to enable not only all of today's but also
tomorrow's telecommunication services.
a. true
b. false
2. In general, rural customers have the same service expectations as their urban
counterparts.
a. true
b. false
3. On a per subscriber basis, the material cost of fiber optics cable is more
significant for rural applications than urban applications.
a. true
b. false
4. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the resulting push toward
deregulation have forced many planners to put their pursuit of FSN solutions
on hold.
a. true
b. false
5. The population shift from city to country has slowed the spread of
improvements in telecommunications and computer technology.
a. true
b. false
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6. What option does a local-loop network provider have for providing an FSN?
a. own the network
b. own, rent, or wholesale the network
c. rent the network
d. rent or wholesale the network
7. An operator might choose not to own an entire network because
_____________.
a. an operator can rent facilities from other entities and resell under its
brand name
b. the investment and risk are too great
c. both a and b
d. neither a nor b
8. An operator might wholesale a portion of its network to another provider in
order to _______________.
a. expand its available retail service offerings
b. avoid the costs and inconvenience of training
c. avoid marketing unfamiliar services
d. all of the above
9. Some of the reasons for the unique characteristics of rural operators include
___________.
a. staffing, zoning, and service needs
b. low-density environments and large populations
c. facilities, staffing, and service needs
d. a and b
e. b and c

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10. Approximately ____ of the members of National Rural Telephone

Cooperative market the DirectTV, DBS service.
a. 50 percent
b. 3 percent
c. 92 percent

Correct Answers
1. The FSN utilizes a single medium to enable not only all of today's but also
tomorrow's telecommunication services.
a. true
b. false
2. In general, rural customers have the same service expectations as their urban
counterparts.
a. true
b. false
3. On a per subscriber basis, the material cost of fiber optics cable is more
significant for rural applications than urban applications.
a. true
b. false
4. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the resulting push toward
deregulation have forced many planners to put their pursuit of FSN solutions
on hold.
a. true
b. false
5. The population shift from city to country has slowed the spread of
improvements in telecommunications and computer technology.
a. true
b. false

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6. What option does a local-loop network provider have for providing an FSN?
a. own the network
b. own, rent, or wholesale the network
c. rent the network
d. rent or wholesale the network
7. An operator might choose not to own an entire network because
_____________.
a. an operator can rent facilities from other entities and resell under its
brand name
b. the investment and risk are too great
c. both a and b
d. neither a nor b
8. An operator might wholesale a portion of its network to another provider in
order to _______________.
a. expand its available retail service offerings
b. avoid the costs and inconvenience of training
c. avoid marketing unfamiliar services
d. all of the above
9. Some of the reasons for the unique characteristics of rural operators include
___________.
a. staffing, zoning, and service needs
b. low-density environments and large populations
c. facilities, staffing, and service needs
d. a and b
e. b and c

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10. Approximately ____ of the members of National Rural Telephone

Cooperative market the DirectTV, DBS service.
a. 50 percent
b. 3 percent
c. 92 percent

Glossary
CPE
customer premise equipment
DBS
direct broadcast satellite
DSL
digital subscriber line
DSLAM
digital subscriber line access multiplexer
DTH
direct to home
FSN
full-service network
HFC
hybrid fiber/coax
ISDN
integrated switched digital network
ISP
Internet service provider
MMDS
multichannel multipoint distribution system
NID
network interface device
ONU
optical network unit
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PCS
personal communications services
POTS
plain old telephone service
RBOC
regional Bell operating company

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