Fibre to the home - GPON vs Active Ethernet

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sbiddle

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#309108 19-Mar-2010 13:26

FibreFan: On the contrary I believe installing 'excessive' Ethernet fibre optics now is a highly logical and smart option - look at it from this perspective. Say we choose Fibre to the Cabinet and 5 - 10 years down the road we find ourselves stuck in a rut as the majority of global players got it right the first time by installing fibre to the door (the likes of Korea, Japan, California and parts of Europe - Singapore is also getting a piece of the action) - by that stage our already insufficient infrastructure will be extremely outdated and will require a massive amount of capital to fix the problem which will not be economical.
Fibre to the Cabinet will be bad news for a country like ours who already have a poor transport infrastructure - we have to look for the smart option, i.e. increasing the scope for transporting data and correspondingly decreasing the transportation of people - to do this we require an 'excessive' system now and will be inconceivable without a world-class communications infrastructure.

Just think about the response that Alexander Bell had from bankers and investors when he was seeking finance for wire telephony in the 1880s: "What are you planning to do Mr Bell … wire up every house in the country?"

The future is inevitable and we must be ready to make drastic changes now in order to secure our place as world-class on the global scale - no one can be certain as to how much growth will occur in the next 5-10 years but we can be ready to it on full force!

#fttd

I don't really get this post. I don't want to take a dig at you but I'm going to be brutally honest and ask whether you really understand on a technical level the differences between the competing fibre standards or even the architecture of an average fibre or copper telecommunications network? Or are you simply trying to push the Vector FTTD marketing ploy without really understanding what it means?

Fibre to the cabinet/node has been happening for years. TelstraClear did this 10 years ago with their HFC rollout in Wellington, Kapiti and Christchurch and Telecom are doing it now with their cabinetisation.

The reality is by the end of 2011 New Zealand will have a nationwide FTTN network providing copper based services to the majority of residents. Whether we want this or not it's going to be built. Sure this isn't copper but these FTTN cabinets are futureproofed and offer a very simple way of deploying fibre services in the future. Because the backhaul already exists fibre can be deployed to premises from these cabinets at a much cheaper cost them rebuilding the entire infrastructure.

In many ways a GPON FTTH network is essentially a glorified FTTN network. Backhaul fibre runs from the OLT to a roadside cabinet with multiple optical splitters and fibre patch panel trays for connecting up to the ONT in a property. The key difference is that these cabinets are passive rather than active. Cabinets still exist and play a key part.

Likewise most active ethernet network proposals also use a FTTN architecture (or fibre to the cabinet as you say), with high capacity bachhaul to a cabinet where the aggregation router is located. This is now now active (ie requires power) rollout. Cabinets still exist and play a key part.

I'd like you to explain in non marketing speak exactly why fibre to the cabinet (which is really FTTN) is *bad*? You're saying it's bad but both fibre solutions use the exact same architecture. How is NZ going to be hurt or limited to Chorus deploying a FTTN network right now that will deliver New Zealand faster, better broadband? I am not for one minute saying that we should not have fibre and that copper is solution because fibre is the future - it does however comes with a significant price tag, both for the rollout and for individual households because an install is not quite as simple as a $89 DIY ADSL modem install.

I'm just getting a little annoyed with much of the spin that is out there..

FibreFan

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#309147 19-Mar-2010 14:32

You got me - I'm definitely not an expert on this issue but am trying my best to learn over the short period I have been given hence my debatable posts. I see them as the best way of getting a clearer picture of peoples views and I am in-fact working with the agency supporting Vectors initiatives so that's that.

In response to your questions, I apologize for my comment saying Fibre to the Cabinet is bad, as you're right - both do use the same architecture - I was speaking in terms of having copper run to the home from the cabinet which largely decreases the value of having fibre being run to the cabinet.
If Chorus (under Telecom) deliver the FTTN network, which they are currently doing, it will provide fast and better broadband - but it also gives them an much tighter hold on the industry and gives them a lot more power which is not necessarily a good thing for Kiwis.
The price tag you speak of is the ultimate peak of the discussion - whether the govt. want to spend the extra $ to safe proof NZer's for many years to come or take the baby step (with only having fibre run to the cabinet) and have to spend the fibre roll out money in the future.

To be honest I'm not a 100% of how easy it will be implement throughout the country with the current technology we have and the technology set to hit our shores in the future, but if the foundation is there, appropriate measures (discussions and solutions to specific problems) can be taken to secure a simple and reliable system with fibre to the door instead of traditional copper to the door and fibre to the cabinet.

I'm still learning about the whole deal so don't take me for anything but an intrigued observer who is keen to learn more about both sides!

Cheers,
Fibrefan

#fttd

cyril7

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#309188 19-Mar-2010 16:04

The FTTN project that Telecom currently is deploying is dragging at least 200odd accessible fibre cores to within 2km (typically 1km) or less of 80% of homes in NZ, this cannot and is not a bad thing, and I would suggest well ahead of Vectors or any other providers current state.

Obviously Telecom are keen to be in the FTTH market when it makes sense, but based on the current $ of digging any fibre from the node into individual homes it will be a while before those 80% homes get anything more than the copper that already exists.

As for the PON v's ptp debate, well in the end I think $ will be the decider and the cost of power and space that extra electronics ptp requires, and yes I am aware that there are lots of documentation that its not that great a diff depending on how you rig it.

Dont forget that a PON does not have to be just a single split ratio, there may be several splitters in any node, some smaller than others depending on what level of service the customer wants. Also the split can be either higher up the nodal layout or embedded lower to allow more flexible selection of service and grade (read split ratios), and the use of blown fibre drop feeds (from splitter to each house) means its reasonably easy to move a customer up the node levels to a lower split if needed.

But my guess is that in the interest of $ we like Australia will flow the 32 PON topology with ptp or low level splits for commercial and customers who want or desire/need higher performance.

my 2c

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#309317 20-Mar-2010 01:08

The future is inevitable and we must be ready to make drastic changes now in order to secure our place as world-class on the global scale - no one can be certain as to how much growth will occur in the next 5-10 years but we can be ready to it on full force!

10GEPON fibre is the (far distant) future for most users darling, using the same splitters as GPON. Commercial users have different requirements that can include synchronous speeds and more finely managed QoS, the main advantages of Active fibre.

Time to find a new industry!

Zeon

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#309338 20-Mar-2010 10:35

webwat:
The future is inevitable and we must be ready to make drastic changes now in order to secure our place as world-class on the global scale - no one can be certain as to how much growth will occur in the next 5-10 years but we can be ready to it on full force!

10GEPON fibre is the future for most users darling, using the same splitters as GPON. Commercial users have different requirements that can include synchronous speeds and more finely managed QoS, the main advantages of Active fibre.

Be careful what you assume, based on current uses of internet technology then yes PON may work however into the future you may be having 3 way HD calling while your kid is streaming internet tv via bit-torrent (look at BBCs testing). The shared upload medium on GPON could become quickly overloaded.

We've made this mistake before in LANs using a shared medium, first coax and that was crap. Then layer 1 hubs, that was crap. Now everyone uses at least layer 2 switches with dedicated synchronous bandwidth per port. TBH I think in 10 years time if not sooner we will be back on this forum bitching about PON and the need for active ethernet the same way as we do about DSL (line conditions, congestion etc.) as we do now.

Sure blowing fibre is an option to go to active ethernet in the future but I'm not sure if we want to be replacing all the CPE gear, resplicing etc.

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webwat

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#309364 20-Mar-2010 13:31

Zeon:
webwat:
The future is inevitable and we must be ready to make drastic changes now in order to secure our place as world-class on the global scale - no one can be certain as to how much growth will occur in the next 5-10 years but we can be ready to it on full force!

10GEPON fibre is the future for most users darling, using the same splitters as GPON. Commercial users have different requirements that can include synchronous speeds and more finely managed QoS, the main advantages of Active fibre.

Be careful what you assume, based on current uses of internet technology then yes PON may work however into the future you may be having 3 way HD calling while your kid is streaming internet tv via bit-torrent (look at BBCs testing). The shared upload medium on GPON could become quickly overloaded.

We've made this mistake before in LANs using a shared medium, first coax and that was crap. Then layer 1 hubs, that was crap. Now everyone uses at least layer 2 switches with dedicated synchronous bandwidth per port. TBH I think in 10 years time if not sooner we will be back on this forum bitching about PON and the need for active ethernet the same way as we do about DSL (line conditions, congestion etc.) as we do now.

Sure blowing fibre is an option to go to active ethernet in the future but I'm not sure if we want to be replacing all the CPE gear, resplicing etc.

Obviously a modern network provider is under no illusion that new access nodes will be any less outdated 10 years later than the current 10 year old equipment is now. There is a very good roadmap for GPON to 10GEPON as well as the option to switch commercial users that need synchronous Ethernet.

Contention ratios will hopefully be driven down over time as well, but likely to settle at 20:1 with the current generation of access nodes because thats what they are designed for. At that ratio you will likely experience congestion at peak times (which its designed for) after more local content takes off, but that doesnt mean overloaded. If you try to connect Ethernet out to home users, the backhaul wont change much unless your home TV studio is allowed a direct connection to the local backbone. I'm sure average users that have extra money for a synchronous link will be ok sharing the backhaul though.

Time to find a new industry!

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PenultimateHop

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#309687 22-Mar-2010 01:20

Since it's a quiet Sunday I thought I'd inject some additional opinion into this thread. :)

Perhaps I should introduce some of these comments by pointing out that the physical plant topics need to be really decoupled from the active technology topics as they're quite discrete issues (and often handled by different units within telcos or "NBNCos"). I'm not really advocating any technology because I believe they all have their purposes and places in a FTTP network on a national scale; I really only aim to educate to avoid some of the FUD I've seen.

savag3: What are peoples thoughts regarding GPON vs Active Ethernet for fibre to the home?

GPON uses passive optical splitters to connect up to 32 fibres to a single fibre which is then connected to an OLT in a roadside cabinet which provides the service. This is a shared medium where all 32 customers recieve the same transmission from the OLT and send back their seperate transmissions on effectively the same fibre. It is pretty similar to the way TelstraClear's Cable network operates - just using fibre instead of copper.

Active Ethernet runs as you would expect for an ordinary Ethernet network. Each customer has their own fibre which runs back to a switch in a roadside cabinet. The type of switch used determines the speed of the connection to the customer and the bandwidth of the uplinks of the switch determines whether there is any contention on the network.

All of the above is more or less correct. GPON can scale to more than 32-way splits (64, 96, and 128 have been shown by several GPON vendors) - no reason to think it can't scale higher in the future either.

savag3: Given that the Government has said it will require dark fibre to be provided and my understanding of GPON is that this wouldn't be possible with that kind of architecture due to the passive splitters combining 32 customers into a single unit. This is due to the fact that all customers on the same fibre can only be connected to one OLT. So GPON is probably dead unless someone convinces the Government not to require dark fibre availability.

Not at all. As you have said yourself, the splitters are passive and there is nothing preventing having individual tails to each address point and being combined at the nearest fibre aggregation cabinet. This is a common FTTH architecture and supports Active Ethernet and xPON deployments in the same fibre architecture. It allows cost-optimisation of the cabinet-to-CO fibre bundles as well.

The Singapore NBN is a good example of this architecture.

Future developments in xPON may also make it possible to split customers on a single fibre to separate OLTs based on WDM, so I wouldn't just rule it out.

savag3: I also believe that GPON is a poor choice because of its shared nature. The last thing we need is yet another shared bandwidth bottleneck.

Potentially a valid criticism of a PON based architecture, but the reality is that 1:1 bandwidth will take some time to become viable (if ever) for residential services. There will always be contention, and frankly having it on the PON is one of the easier places to manage it and resolve it quickly, vs. having it elsewhere in the aggregation network. Deploying an Ethernet switch to a street-side cabinet will share the same issues (e.g. 1GE to every home on a 48-port switch, but 1 or 2x10GE uplinks? You have... contention.)

savag3: My understanding is that GPON is incapable of delivering 1Gbps and would also struggle with even a sustained 100mbps to all 32 users sharing the link to the OLT. This seems a bit silly given the likely lifetime of this installation of many decades.

That is not correct. GPON today uses 2.5G wavelengths so you can get 1Gbps at a rather inefficient split-ratio, but EPON/10G-EPON and future GPON technologies support multiple wavelengths and higher transponder rates. An evolution in action - kinda like Ethernet.

savag3:

This pdf has an interesting comparision of the two technologies.

I also wonder what the implications are of the Government requiring an Active Ethernet/dark fibre style of network on Telecom's GPON deployments in those new subdivisions. Would they end up with their network being overbuilt by another provider?

I would hope that they deployed a sensible fibre architecture to support Ethernet in parallel to PON if it was required - the two technologies are complimentary, not exclusive.

binarybrother: GPON is probably a much more cost effective option in the NZ environment than P2P Ethernet, unless you happen to live in an apartment building.

Actually, apartment buildings are some of the more annoying to deploy high-speed services to, because the landlords/building management companies often don't understand why it needs to be done and want to charge the operator a premium for doing it (unless legislated to do so, as in Singapore). Apartment complexes are a prime candidate for Fibre-to-the-Basement and VDSL2 in the existing copper infrastructure in the risers.

raytaylor:I personally would rather not have them use GPON
Active p2p is my prefered choice. This network is going to be aimed at delivering television services as well and once you get 2 hdtv decoders in a household, bandwidth starts getting scarce when the trunk fibre is shared. Remember multicast switches and routers are the key to making a digital tv network over fibre work - or anything that can compete with sky anyway. If you have 10 houses on a gpon fibre trunk, and the technology only allows that to divide equally - that means that the benefits of multicasting stop further up the line. A potential of 20 decoders over those 10 houses would mean that the same channel might be going down that same trunk fibre 2 or 3 times wasting alot of bandwidth.

PON has a lot of options for managing bandwidth, including (reasonably) efficient multicast functions. HDTV is not a huge bandwidth concern - but UHDTV might be!

raytaylor: I would only favour gpon if dark fibre was still avaliable to me - When its avaliable locally I want to connect my home and office by a private fibre network. Will happily pay a nice price for it too.

Gpon might also be workable if they could assign different amounts of spectrum down the fibre to different nodes. Eg. House 1 gets 50% of the light frequencies because they are on a higher plan than the other 5 houses on the trunk fibre so they can share the remainder and get 10% each.

There's no reason why you couldn't get multiple fibre termination services to your house if that's what you wanted - of course you may find it cost effective to simply take an additional port off the NTU (be it a PON ONU or Ethernet NTU) that offers you p2p/p2mp Ethernet services. Then you don't need to worry about managing optical issues at all.

I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve by "spectrum management" in fibre; but a similar capability does exist in terms of WDM-PON.

webwat: GPON gets much more economic in low density areas where just a few strands can be run out to passive nodes miles away that are much cheaper without active powered equipment and aircon etc. So you can have the GPON service in a cabinet within easy reach of the backhaul providers Point of Presence. Roadmap for GPON is to move to 10GEPON but thats distant future and uses the same splitters anyway, so 10GEPON is pointless for large nodes until 40Gbps backhaul becomes more common. Both GPON and 10GEPON have QoS functions built into the protocol, and I dont think you will be using the full 2.5Gbps line capacity until your ISP finds a way to squeeze money out of you for international traffic. The maximum 64 users per GPON link will have to share for now.

Just to clarify: GPON and EPON are completely different technologies, defined by different standards organisations: GPON is defined by ITU-T G.984, while EPON is defined by IEEE 802.3ah (and IEEE 802.3av for 10G-EPON). They're incompatible on the wire and I really don't think I agree that there is a 'roadmap' from GPON to EPON!

It's worth noting that GPON has multiple grades of service, including an effective 'scavenger' class (EIR) allowing a subscriber to burst to the line-rate of the PON if no other higher grades of service require that bandwidth - if the operator chooses to configure it that way...

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#309689 22-Mar-2010 01:35

cyril7: The Alcatel ones I have seen that Telecom have been playing with dont have RFoG, but it was an option for the product. Guess it all depends ultimately what marketing strategy they have in mind.

In the states and in particular Version Fios the use of the MoCA and HomePNA interface (local ethernet over RG6 coax) is a natural one as such a large number of houses are wired for cable TV so the cables are already there.

I would not expect MoCA to be so common on ONT's deployed here.

In many part of Europe, cable is also very much the norm, so MoCA seems to be popular there too.

Most ONU vendors have a wide range of interface types which actually does give PON something of an advantage:

Given that you need some form of assurance capability in the network for troubleshooting to replace the PSTN/copper equivalent of the ETP, an ONU becomes a logical place to do it. Some benefits that many of them have are 'built in' capabilities like multiple FE/GE ports, RF outputs for delivering TV services, E1 ports, POTS ports for PSTN services, built in RGs, etc.

These are important considerations in a national network because you have a wide variety of deployment end-sites - it isn't only about the home user - because you have traffic lights, power and water meters, bus stops, etc, that may need various telephony or data services and incoporating them into the NBN actually does allow the realisation of some of the economic benefits claimed by this sort of networking. There are Ethernet NTUs as well, but generally speaking they don't have the same cost-point or flexibility as some of the ONUs on the market -- which starts to cause issues when the bean-counters do their financial analysis and look at what they're getting from the new network's ability to service existing customers...

FibreFan: From what has been said previously - it seems an active MetroEthernet system is definitely the best option for NZ's in regards to future prospects/growth of the country, possibilities of a larger amount of people working from home (far better video conferencing capabilities) which would spin off into possibilites of reduced carbon emissions and reduced traffic around central CBD's around Auckland.
Using GPON would entail another shared network and, as said above, could result in a much larger/complicated broadband bottleneck which would cost a lot more to fix in the future if we don't get it right the first time.
I don't see the point in taking a baby step in the process, i.e. going through with GPON as things are only going to get bigger and harder to break through in the future. Ethernet has shown to provide;
1) high network reliability
2) easy to scale/manage and trouble shoot &
3) although to initially employ would cost more than GPON (15% i think it was), it would be far more cost effective to produce the results now than in x amount of years.

At least if it's done now we can make use of the worlds most up to date technology and be a strong global force on the digital front. I'm all for bringing fibre to the door. Go Vector!!!

I guess I really can only say "show me an Ethernet network that has scaled happily to multi-hundred-K/million endpoints". It's entirely different from having a <10K user network like most Metro Ethernet networks (and believe me, I build those for a living!) to having >100K or >1M endpoints to work with.

I really do struggle with the comments around 'easy to scale' and 'easy to manage/troubleshoot' given that Metro Ethernet is not cheap, and to effectively scale it for broadband deployments you need DSLAM or OLT price-points in your Metro Ethernet switches, which typically is not aligned. Don't forget that broadband services to the home has entirely different OAM and security paradigm to corporate Metro Ethernet services, because it is the Internet and it's deliberately hostile. I'd love to hear what the envisioned price-per-port cost is in a Metro Ethernet delivered network for the whole country -- talking scale, not individual silos which have "made do" with lower cost components - although invariably they have to upgrade as the network grows...

NB: It's arguable whether Ethernet is the world's most up-to-date technology since it was developed quite some years (1983) before other technologies such as EPON (2004 - although EPON is just an extension to the base 802.3 standard), GPON (2003), or even ATM (late 80s/early 90s) ;).

PenultimateHop

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#309690 22-Mar-2010 01:39

Zeon: Be careful what you assume, based on current uses of internet technology then yes PON may work however into the future you may be having 3 way HD calling while your kid is streaming internet tv via bit-torrent (look at BBCs testing). The shared upload medium on GPON could become quickly overloaded.

We've made this mistake before in LANs using a shared medium, first coax and that was crap. Then layer 1 hubs, that was crap. Now everyone uses at least layer 2 switches with dedicated synchronous bandwidth per port. TBH I think in 10 years time if not sooner we will be back on this forum bitching about PON and the need for active ethernet the same way as we do about DSL (line conditions, congestion etc.) as we do now.

Sure blowing fibre is an option to go to active ethernet in the future but I'm not sure if we want to be replacing all the CPE gear, resplicing etc.

It's technology evolution -- and will occur regardless of what active technology is chosen. As long as the right physical technology (fibre!) is chosen and architected well, then the active technology is largely irrelevant. It will change over time.

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#309710 22-Mar-2010 09:10

PenultimateHop: It's technology evolution -- and will occur regardless of what active technology is chosen. As long as the right physical technology (fibre!) is chosen and architected well, then the active technology is largely irrelevant. It will change over time.

Indeed. I remember around the time of 33.6 modems that several people said there was a "hard limit" of around 35 kb/s over copper phone lines, and that there's no way to get it running faster than that. Of course, we're now in the multi-megabits. I agree that getting the fibre in there is the important bit; more technology will come along as time goes on that can get more performance out of the fibre.

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#309727 22-Mar-2010 10:09

Indeed, a twisted pair of copper was only ever considered suitable for morse code, now we run Gigabits of data in short lengths and megabits in many kms, but the cable may well have remained the same, well maybe not as open wire.

Cyril

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#309826 22-Mar-2010 16:01

GPON - Ethernet comparison

Terms:

Central Office is the location where access nodes are hosted and connect to backhaul. Might be a traditional phone exchange, data centre or large enough outdoor cabinet to host several access node chassis, cooling, backhaul switches, and fibre trays. Always has some form of battery and/or diesel backup.

Backhaul is the bandwidth (usually redundant fibre links) connecting the access nodes to the provider or ISP, and from there to internet.

ONT is the optical terminal located at the users place, and converts the optical data into useful signals on copper, eg phone, ethernet, powerline, TV/coax.

OLT is the device that terminates PON optics at the CO, normally a card in a chassis of several OLTs along with any ADSL or Ethernet subscribers sharing the service and redundant backhaul, which together form the access node.

PON means Passive Optical Network, ie fibre that doesnt require any data switch to split the connection among many users. PON splitters can be hosted in the street or at the CO but lines are limited to around 5km total distance.

Homerun fibre means the customer gets a dedicated strand back to the CO. Passive splitters can be located at the CO (to allow individual upgrade to Ethernet) or in street cabinets (sharing part of link to central office).

GPON

Many choices of ONTs designed for home and small/medium business connection;

Works with either homerun fibre or using passive splitters in the street;

Supports dynamic bandwidth allocation that prevents upstream congestion/collisions;

Avoid the complexities involved in keeping electronic equipment operating outdoors;

Several splitters can be colocated in a single cabinet, allowing a combined PON or multiple PONs, up to 64 users each;

Possibly more practical in scenarios where overhead lines are used;

ONTs are not compatible with 10GEPON but use same fibre and splitters if ONTs are to be upgraded, although more efficient with colocated splitters;

Competitive issues to be managed include competitor hosting at central office and choice of bypassing splitters.

Active Ethernet

The access node does not use passive splitters, so most efficient using homerun fibre to avoid needing the number of distributed nodes that Telecom have been installing to overcome copper limitations;

Provides synchronous bandwidth so ideal for commercial users, ie same speed both upstream and downstream;

Supports longer distance;

Very standard technology, so fibre can connect to an access node (some have ethernet subscriber cards plus redundant uplink cards) or a variety of Ethernet switches available on the market.

Greater potential for congestion of backhaul and unreliability, so Metro Ethernet switches need to be designed for this type of application.

Optical modules available for 100Mbps (100BASE-BX) or Gigabit (1000BASE-BX10) will depend on equipment being connected to;

Because efficiency dictates hosting at a Central Office, competitors can (and expensively) host their own equipment at the CO and move users between competing providers and/or types of service;

Coexisting services and equipment that Active Ethernet encourages has the effect of improving competition/service levels and reducing economic efficiency (prices may be higher).

Access to hosting and backhaul at CO would still be issues, but regulation may be required to ensure that minimum standard of bitstream services remain available to smaller competitors along with QoS for voice services.

Competitive hosting at CO without the user's ONT having POTS lines raises the possibility of 111 emergency voice calls being unavailable on some services due to convergence of voice and data. This will probably result in regulatory intervention, eg from Commerce Commission.

My conclusion

Efficient GPON rollouts could be done in a way that allows competitors to colocate splitters, and allow for a few homerun fibres to bypass splitters at the same time. Fibre in commercial areas should probably be run in a way that allows larger number of commercial users to meet a wider range of requirements for different types of data links. No one choice of technology is suitable for all users or overcomes all market related problems, or eliminates the need for regulation. What aspects of FTTD should be protected by regulatory intervention would be a useful topic to discuss here (in ICT Policies and Regulation ).

Time to find a new industry!

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#310295 23-Mar-2010 16:47

A recent guesstimate of prices for FTTD are an end-user charge of around NZ$65 a month on top of existing ISP fees, so international data component of ISP fees will continue to be the a big factor limiting uptake for a while unless its more efficient than connecting to the Telecom network.

Time to find a new industry!

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