The New York Times has an enlightening story today looking at how Verizon plans to spend $20-billion to deliver fiber-optic connectivity to residential households. Why? Well, Verizon believes it has no choice if it wants to deliver the same kind of bandwidth-hungry services (high-definition television, video-on-demand, etc.) as cable rivals such as Comcast and Time-Warner. It's a huge investment and a strategic gamble but many carriers have no choice if they want to compete on a level playing field with their cable rivals, which have been happily signing up hundreds of thousands of new home phone customers from carriers in recent years. It is interesting that while Verizon aggressively pushes forward with fiber-to-the-home, Canadian carriers Bell Canada and Telus Corp. are betting on fiber-to-the-node This means they are pushing fiber close to households, and then hoping compression technology can give the big, fat pipe over the "last mile". Will this strategy pay off? Well, only time will tell but the strong growth of Canadian cablecos such as Rogers, Videotron and Shaw recently is a troubling development for Bell and Telus. One thing I do find fascinating about the carrier-cable battle is how the cable industry has used CableLabs to support its efforts. For those unfamiliar with CableLabs, it's a non-profit R&D consortium that develops innovative products and standards for its members. You would think the carriers would have - or should have - something similar to effectively fight back. Instead, the carriers rely on cash-strapped telecom equipment suppliers for new products and services, while arguably not spending nearly enough on their own R&D. For more on FTTH, check out Information Week, which writes about the technology's strong growth, albeit from a small base.