FTTH and HDTV

Too many abbreviations, although I’m sure you know what at least one of them means. For those of you who aren’t up to speed with modern lingo, the first one means Fiber To The Home, and is basically the latest way of connecting to the Internet.

FTTH uses a fiber optic cable to take information from the internet into your home, and allows users to get ultra-high bandwidth. If you don’t know what bandwidth is, don’t worry, the more the merrier; ultra-high bandwidth means you’ll be downloading loads of information really quickly.

So what’s all this got to do with HDTV? Well, just think how much stuff you do at home with a TV that’s in some way connected to the internet. There’s video on demand, pay per view, home networking, online video gaming, and a few other things, all of which suck tonnes of info from the net.

Standard phone wires used to be adequate, but now we want to use all these services in HD, and the truth is, your phone wire won’t quite cut it. It’s not going to explode, melt, or otherwise destroy anything, but you won’t be able to get a full HD picture without FTTH.

Fiber optic cable is where you need to be to get all this stuff in fast HD, although it is expensive at the moment. It’s just a matter of weighing up the costs.