Calling Up New Telecommunications Services : Developer to Build In High-Tech Wiring
In a bow to the high-tech needs of executives who buy California’s priciest homes, Pacific Bell has agreed to wire an Orange County builder’s luxury project with fiber-optic cable--the first time entire houses have been wired with technology capable of transmitting voice, data and video simultaneously.
The homes, with prices starting at $700,000, are being built by developer RGC on a hill overlooking the Pacific. They will feature “broad-band” fiber-optic systems, which transmit voice and data information faster and with less garble than conventional copper lines and carry video signals that copper wiring cannot handle.
Such systems are widely used by businesses today, but few home builders have asked Pacific Bell to install the wiring in their residences, said Gaspare Lovasco, manager of Pacific Bell’s residential fiber project.
“The fact is that the (residential) broad-band market has just begun heating up in the past six months,” he said. Development of broad-band technology, which could ultimately bring interactive phone and TV capabilities to every home in the nation, “has been more technology-pushed than market-pulled,” Lovasco said. “No one has been beating down our door asking for it.”
However, he said his company’s goal is to have half of its residential customers converted to fiber optics within 10 years, “and 100% conversion by 2015.”
Construction on the RGC project is expected to begin in September. Both Pacific Bell and GTE California are running other residential fiber-optic experiments.
For residential use, major benefits of a fiber system are its ability to transmit voice, data and video simultaneously on the same line, as well as the accuracy of data transmission over fiber networks.
With conventional phone transmissions of computer information via copper wire, for example, about 10 of every 1 million units, or bits, of data are lost because the strength of the electrical impulses carrying the information erodes over long distances. That is the equivalent of one letter of the alphabet, or one numerical digit, for every 16,000 words--and if it is a critical letter or digit, it can render an entire document meaningless.
Fiber-optic systems, which use pulses of light to carry messages through glass fibers less than half the thickness of a human hair, drop only about one bit of data per million, making them 10 times more accurate.
Fiber systems are expensive to install in homes because the technology is new. Lovasco said the estimated $400,000 cost of the RGC project, which has 111 homes, is about 40% higher than for a conventional copper wire system. Pacific Bell and RGC are splitting the extra cost, he said.
But fiber cables have virtually limitless capacities. That means the costly, labor-intensive process of tearing up streets to lay new cable may soon be a thing of the past.
RGC Chairman E. James Murar said he believes that the fiber-optic system will be a selling tool for his Newport Beach company’s development because so many of the potential buyers are corporate executives who need to link their homes and businesses with computers, faxes and telephones and want the increased speed and accuracy that fiber-optic systems can provide.
