TECHNOLOGY: FTTH and GPON technology

Optics has changed everything. Today, fibre to the home (FTTH) or fibre to the node (FTTN) is looking like must-haves. Beyond fibre however, the kind of passive optical networking (PON) deployed gives telecom service providers options in terms of capital expense, projected ROI and electrical/optical network maintenance costs. Broadband networking of any sort, especially broadband to the individual consumer, demands new access strategies. Traditional copper loops were designed for analogy voice service. The way voice has been provided has evolved over the years to use more fibre-linked remote digital loop carriers (DLCs). And with the need to develop broadband connections to consumers, DLCs were upgraded to so-called "new-generation DLCs" (NGDLCs) that supported digital subscriber loop (DSL) connections over the same copper pairs. These NGDLCs are fed by a fibre connection, creating what is popularly called a "fibre-to-the-node" (FTTN) architecture. The network architecture Pushing fibre close to the customer is generically called "deep fibre," and various acronyms are used to indicate just how deep the fibre is. FTTH means "fibre to the home," which is the extreme of giving every user an optical-electrical termination. FTTC takes "fibre to the curb," serving a group of homes, while FTTN means "fibre to the node" or "neighbourhood," and allows each fibre remote to serve a larger population. Fibre is not a new development in access networks. Not only has it been used for almost two decades in the provisioning of high-speed commercial/enterprise customers, service providers in the 1990s found that replacing large bundles of copper by a few fibre strands could improve service reliability and lower craft cost.