bbpmag.com - Broadband Properties

Broadband Properties’ survey of independent telcos deploying FTTH found that GPON was the most
prevalent standard. For companies deploying fiber today, active Ethernet is also popular.
Matching the Technology
to the Application
In the end, most North American service
providers have chosen GPON for
residential and small business deployments,
while favoring P2P for serving
medium to large businesses. Beyond
the religious arguments of the technology
zealots, there are some very practical,
real-world benefits for each of these
technologies (see the chart at the bottom
of this page) that make them more suitable
for different applications.
But exceptions to these general
trends have abounded. Service providers
for high-rise MDUs might view the
concentrated bandwidth needed to provision
a large MDU as more suitable for
P2P than GPON. Alternatively, rural
service providers with little competition
and little housing growth may not
have the subscriber density to make the
best use of GPON and may opt for the
longer optical reach available with P2P
served out of the central office.
With both technologies appropriate
for different applications in the same
network, a solution is needed that enables
service providers to serve both
GPON and P2P from a common infrastructure
and be flexible enough to be
able to change from one technology to
another easily. This capability is a valuable
component of what we at Calix call
a “Unified Access Infrastructure.”
GPON and active Ethernet are each valuable in different circumstances.
64 | BROADBAND PROPERTIES | www.broadbandproperties.com | January/February 2009