Central Street Neighbors Association

At the CSNA meeting last night, I reported on the nascent effort to bring Google high speed internet investment to Evanston. Many people were concerned about a repeat of the ugly V-RAD boxes littering our parkways. The following is a response from another attendee to the first meeting held 2/23/10.
 
From Neal Daringer:
The AT&T U-Verse service in Evanston is not fiber. I don't work for AT&T so I might be wrong on that. I did have the U-Verse service for about a year though. AT&T U-Verse is a Fiber to the Node(FTTN) product. Which means that I never actually saw the fiber optic cable. AT&T still used the existing phone wiring in the home. The google method, as far as I know, is Fiber to the Home(FTTH). The fiber would actually come into the home. I have read that fiber optic cables have virtually unlimited capacity for speed. Which means that it can grow to meet demand. I have heard of cases where AT&T did use FTTH, but I have heard of none in Evanston.

Verizon offers a simliar service to AT&T, except they actually did run the fiber optic cable to the home. So, just going on that assumption, I would imagine it would be a simliar offering to what Google has in mind, at least from a technical standpoint. A great article documenting an installation is located at this link, http://www.bricklin.com/fiosinstall.htm  There are excellent pictures there as well. Just from the pictures, it appears that the visible equipment used for the service is far less intrusive than the AT&T offering.