21285 - SCTE Broadband Dec2021 COMPLETE v1

54 Vol. 43 No. 4 - November 2021 Issue technical n Unable to gain permission from building owner to install fibre inside the building n Unable to gain construction permission for historically protected buildings n Excessive cost to install fibre inside the building n Excessive cost to restore landscaping or paving n Excessive cost due to geological factors To a large degree, these barriers are avoided if fixed-wireless or the existing copper telephone, coax, or CAT5 wires are used for the section near the customer. Over this short distance, more than a gigabit-per-second can be achieved, so there is no bitrate bottleneck. As increased government funding and incentives can help expand the number of locations served by fibre, the roll out of fibre continues to gain pace across both Europe and North America. For example, the UK Government has recently announced ambitious plans to build out a 100% Fibre To The Home (FTTH) landscape by utilising existing underground water pipes as a way of connecting remote households. This highlights the steps that national governments are taking to avoid the costly process of digging up roads and land, as well as pulling cables to the home. However, this is best complemented with other strategies to reach the maximum number of locations. Fibre Access Alternatives Customers may be served by fibre all the way to the premises (FTTP) or nearly all the way (FTTep). Both alternatives deliver approximately the same bitrate, but for the situations discussed in the previous section, FTTep costs less and is more practical. FTTep’s lower cost enables the delivery of multi-gigabit service to more homes, millions of more homes. In addition to avoiding the cost and logistical barriers of installing new fibre inside the building and in the last section leading to the building, FTTep can avoid the cost and inconvenience of the network technician entering the premises. In many cases, the customer can self-install the necessary equipment. FTTep speeds the deployment of broadband service by avoiding the delays of waiting for construction approvals and scheduling construction and installation crews. As described in the Broadband Forum documents [1] and [2], fibre-to-the-extension-point (FTTep) consists of fibre from the network to an Optical to Electrical (O2E) conversion unit near the customer’s premises, where the optical signal is converted to electrical signals traversing over phone wires, CAT5 wires, or a coax cable. The O2E unit may serve a single living unit via a single cable, or the O2E may serve multiple living units via separate wires to each customer premises. In the latter case, the O2E could be a Distribution Point Unit (DPU) as described in the Broadband Forum TR-301i2 [3]. Also, the O2E could employ radio signal such as Wi-Fi or 5G wireless to convey the signals over the last few hundred metres. FTTP A typical Fibre To The Premises (FTTP, see Figure 1) installation has fibre running all the way from An Optical Line Terminal (OLT) to an Optical Network Terminal (ONT, also known as an ONU) located at the outside wall of the building or inside the building. The ethernet signals run over CAT5 wire from the ONT to the Residential Gateway (RG). So, the difference between FTTP and FTTep is the length of copper wire in the last section, not the existence of any copper wire. In some cases, the ONT and RG functions are integrated into one box, with no connecting wire. Figure 1: Fibre To The Premises (FTTP)