Description

More and more feature-rich services are being created, and people's expectations for quality of experience (QoE) are increasing. The predominant broadband access solutions deployed today are the digital subscriber line (DSL) and community antenna television (CATV) / (cable TV) based networks. However, both of these technologies have limitations because they are based on infrastructure that was originally built for carrying voice and analog TV signals, respectively; but their retrofitted versions to carry data are not optimal. Currently deployed blends of asymmetric DSL (ADSL) technologies provide 1.5Mb/s of downstream bandwidth and 128kbits/s of upstream bandwidth at best. Although variations of DSL such as very-high-bit-rate DSL (VDSL), which can support up to 50Mb/s of downstream bandwidth, these technologies have much more severe distance limitations. Passive optical networks (PONs) have evolved to provide much higher bandwidth in the access network. It is a point-to-multipoint, fiber to the premises network architecture in which unpowered optical splitters are used to enable a single optical fiber to serve multiple premises.

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