RBI Cabinets are they capable of having GPON cards/boards fitted?

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godber

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#142437 13-Mar-2014 08:57

Hi

Can RBI cabinets have GPON OLT line cards fitted in addition to the ADSL/ADSL2/VDSL cards?

Just noticed some of the products from the manufacturers seem to support this so was wondering if the 'products' fitted the the cabinets have that capability.

Many Thanks

Godfrey
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Sounddude

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#1004689 13-Mar-2014 09:00

While they are technically capable, they don't.

Under the CFH rules I believe Chorus are not allowed to mix fibre and copper. They have to be separate cabinets.

Also generally the active GPON kit is actually in the exchanges. Only passive splitters and fibre trays exist in the fibre cabinets. This is to reduce cost by aggregation of equipment and not having to power the cabinets etc.

plambrechtsen

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#1004703 13-Mar-2014 09:42

The other complexity is that the Copper network is a physically different network from the Fibre one. So if you were going to have the OLT cards in the Copper ISAMs then you would be delivering Fibre services over a Copper handover.

It's a completely different stack and I don't think there is any desire to deliver services from the same ISAM due to how the two networks are completely different.

godber

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#1004721 13-Mar-2014 10:12

Sounddude: While they are technically capable, they don't.

Under the CFH rules I believe Chorus are not allowed to mix fibre and copper. They have to be separate cabinets.

Also generally the active GPON kit is actually in the exchanges. Only passive splitters and fibre trays exist in the fibre cabinets. This is to reduce cost by aggregation of equipment and not having to power the cabinets etc.

Many thanks for the answer. The cabinet I was interested in is actually an exchange/hut so I thought only having to put a card in would reduce the cost.

Godfrey
Auckland/Coroglen, New Zealand
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BMarquis

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#1007782 18-Mar-2014 07:02

While the 7302 ISAM chassis that are in cabinets are physically capable of accepting the GPON line card, we would also need to replace the Network Termination (controller) card.
This involves a migration of config and services between the NT card types (not a straight forward operation)

Then there are OSS/BSS issues, as the different services are managed and build by different back-end systems, etc, etc.

I wish it was as easy as you guys think it might be :)

The fact that OLTs are exchange and not cabinet based are the least of the issues.

InstallerUFB

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#1007819 18-Mar-2014 08:15

godber: Hi

Can RBI cabinets have GPON OLT line cards fitted in addition to the ADSL/ADSL2/VDSL cards?

Just noticed some of the products from the manufacturers seem to support this so was wondering if the 'products' fitted the the cabinets have that capability.

Many Thanks

The simple answer is yes but....

as has already been commented on there are many reasons why they arent (at this point in time) but it mostly boils down to the cost vs revenue / service quality

Simply the cost (includeing loss of revenue/service quality of other options that could have been installed in the same 'space') of installing GPON OLTs directly into RBI cabinets far out ways the revenue/ service quality boost that it can generate - when the cost of a centraly based GPON shelf and optical spliting at cabinets & smaller exchanges is far lower with an effective no loss of service quality.

I know of one GPON Self that currently has connected 8 rural schools connected off just one card (with the furtherest being 25-30kms from the GPON) via verious local and remote spliters and all have effective service.

webwat

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#1011410 23-Mar-2014 15:18

They might actually do that sometime after UFB has been completed and the costs of maintaining copper phone networks starts to outweigh the cost of fibre alternatives for small towns more than 10km or so from the nearest UFB exchange.

It wouldn't necessarily be part of UFB or up to UFB specs, or even done by a big Telco, but even a 64-way GPON split ratio has far more capacity than any mobile network. Some towns in USA have built out their own fibre networks to compete with the local phone and cable providers, similar to what Enable did in Christchurch.

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plambrechtsen

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#1011611 24-Mar-2014 09:26

webwat: They might actually do that sometime after UFB has been completed and the costs of maintaining copper phone networks starts to outweigh the cost of fibre alternatives for small towns more than 10km or so from the nearest UFB exchange.

It wouldn't necessarily be part of UFB or up to UFB specs, or even done by a big Telco, but even a 64-way GPON split ratio has far more capacity than any mobile network. Some towns in USA have built out their own fibre networks to compete with the local phone and cable providers, similar to what Enable did in Christchurch.

As has already been said by people in the know I doubt it's going to happen without a very significant re-architect of the Chorus network, that would cost a non-trivial amount of money to make happen. Actually provisioning onto the ISAM is the "easy" bit, it's everything northbound to get to that point from wholesale customer ordering the service (fulfil) and making sure it's working to specification / checking things when it's broken (assure) and sending the wholesaler a bill for the service that's hard. All of those systems are completely separate in the Copper and Fibre worlds as the Copper world was inherited from Telecom, and Fibre Chorus has built themselves from scratch.