Broadband Communities

JAN-FEB 2014

BROADBAND COMMUNITIES is the leading source of information on digital and broadband technologies for buildings and communities. Our editorial aims to accelerate the deployment of Fiber-To-The-Home and Fiber-To-The-Premises.

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64 | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | www.broadbandcommunities.com | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2014 TECHNOLOGY Is VDSL+PON the Cure For Consumer Broadband Addiction? New technologies allow telcos to create competitive broadband oferings by taking fber almost to the home. By Christopher Moezzi / Broadcom T here's no way around it: Consumers have become addicted to broadband, and that habit shows no signs of easing anytime soon. Streaming TV lovers, online gamers and videoconferencing pros eagerly consume bandwidth as if it were available in an unlimited supply. Tey access multimedia-rich, high- bandwidth applications on PCs, laptops, tablets, TVs and smartphones throughout their homes, often at the same time. Understandably, this presents a challenge for today's global carriers. Traditional, fxed- bandwidth, copper access infrastructure doesn't always satisfy growing bandwidth-per-subscriber demands as they inch closer to 100 Mbps, and upgrading to fber is a time-consuming, costly proposition. In some cases, replacing or extending copper infrastructure may simply be too disruptive to residential customers. Carriers need cost-efective ways to meet subscriber demand for high-bandwidth streaming media, voice and video applications in the home. What's the solution to consumer broadband addiction? A promising and perhaps surprising answer to that question comes from coupling very-high-speed digital subscriber line 2 (VDSL2) technology with passive optical network (PON) strategies to deliver communications connectivity to consumers over the last few hundred meters. With more than 350 million subscribers worldwide, DSL represents the largest segment of the wireline broadband market, far exceeding both fber-to-the-home (FTTH) and cable deployments. Using frequencies of up to 30 MHz, VDSL2 can provide data rates of up to 250 Mbps over very short distances (30–100 meters) and 100 Mbps over distances less than 500 meters when combined with vectoring technology. As a result, it is well equipped to provide the necessary bandwidth to meet the growing consumer demand. Fiber-based PON confgurations also have a critical role to play in helping service providers address the challenges of deploying higher-performance access network oferings to residential subscribers. PON is used primarily for FTTH and for fber-to-the-basement (FTTB) broadband connections. Tese fber- only telecommunications networks leverage a point-to-multipoint confguration. Tis means that, in the feld, optical fber is split one or more times using an optical splitter so it can be shared among multiple users – typically 16, 32 or 64 subscribers. Te ability to share transmission fber among a large number of residential customers makes PON the technology of choice where optical access is deployed. Delivering fber to the premises via a point-to-point confguration is usually more expensive and is much less frequent. Te case for point-to-point fber is more easily made in fber-based business services applications, in which maximizing performance trumps cost considerations. BBC_Jan14.indd 64 1/27/14 1:48 PM

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