nanog mailing list archives

Re: Last Mile Design


From: Mark Tinka <mark.tinka () seacom mu>
Date: Sat, 9 Feb 2019 17:29:56 +0200

My preference, for the home, would be Active-E. But I do understand the
economics that may support PON, and my position on that has softened
over the years. My service provider delivers their FTTH service to me
via PON, and for the most part, it's been all good.

That said, I was particularly impressed with what CDE Lightband did in
Clarksville, Tennessee, where they deployed their FTTH network with
Active-E using Brocade to over 60,000 subscribers:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV1nYGl_Bjc

If I had to build a consumer broadband network and had the budget (and
owned the fibre) to do so, I'd definitely always choose Active-E:   

In South Africa, we have an access network operator that uses Active-E
primarily to deliver their service, making it perhaps the only FTTH
provider not using PON to do this. I find this quite fascinating.

Mark.

On 9/Feb/19 12:59, Ben Cannon wrote:
I should probably have mentioned that in this sense I view “urban” as
exclusive to “single family homes” - meaning I’m talking about high
density modern urban with under grounding requirements - and high rise
residential towers.

We are the opposite, we are presently enterprise, midsize, and
exotic-small business only, and have no residential arm or support
structure (or SLA expectations, or standards or lack thereof) of a
residential connection.

-Ben.

-Ben Cannon
CEO 6x7 Networks & 6x7 Telecom, LLC 
ben () 6by7 net <mailto:ben () 6by7 net>



On Feb 9, 2019, at 2:54 AM, Baldur Norddahl
<baldur.norddahl () gmail com <mailto:baldur.norddahl () gmail com>> wrote:

PON in urban areas absolutely makes sense. Maybe less in a high rise
area, where each building can have a small building wide network of
its own. But it in areas with single family homes PON is king.

Our POPs can have up to 10 000 customers each. All on a single 96
fiber strand cable leading into the POP building. We have extra
ducts, but nothing that would allow us to change that to a point to
point network. That would require 100x that 96 fiber cable.

With extra ducts it would be possible to rebuild from PON to point to
point. But it would require massive investments. Basically you would
have to invest all that we saved by building PON. For starters, you
would have to have many more POPs.

And yes, there are splitters in the hand holes. This is not what
stops you from rebuilding from PON. It is the fact that we never paid
for extra fiber. The backbone in a sub area is typically build with a
24 fiber strand cable. Because fibers are not free and are actually
quite expensive as the number of fibers grow and the distances get
longer. We can do a few point to point connections, for example if we
need to deliver a commercial service or for our own needs (to connect
POPs etc).

We are not big on commercial services. But if we were, I would use
WDM splitters for that. Or the long awaited 10G PON if that ever
arrives and turns out at a price point that works.

Regards,

Baldur
 



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