Fiber to the premises

From ArticleWorld

Fiber to the premises, or fiber to the home as it may be known in some areas, is derived from the fact that in order for present day, high-end telecommunication avenues to be brought to our fingertips at home or work, it involves the complex and intensive use of fiber optic cables and its accessories.

FTTP is fast becoming the standard used in today’s world of telecommunication, be it via the telephone, television or Internet services. From the days of yore, information has moved away from just being brought to us in a printed format or an audio format, to one that is highly interactive and aims to stimulate all the senses of the human body. All this has been made possible primarily through the use of broadband technology and services made cheaply available by the research and development of optical fiber cables.

In FTTP, there are two main standards employed in this field of operations: ‘Active FTTP’ and “Passive Optical Network’. The former involves the use of electronics in the neighborhood circuitry while the latter does not.

The Active FTTP technology

The advantage of active FTTP, due to the presence of the routers and switches in the vicinity, usually one set of accessories for every 500 houses, is that these intermediate equipments assists the central router in assimilating the layer 2 and layer 3 signals and thereby reducing the load on the central carrier unit. By conforming to the international standard of optical fiber cable technology of IEEE 802.3aH, service providers using this technology can provide their customers with 100 Mbits data over a single mode fiber.

Passive optical network technology

PON does away with the use of intermediate routers and switches in the vicinity and transmits all the signals to the central carrier. This network has passive splitters, splitters that are just meant to split the signals into more number of parts without re-routing or assimilating the signals on the way. All the signals are processed the central carrier. By the use of this kind of splitter on the network, each signal is split up in the ratio of 1:16, 1:32 or 1:64. Though more economical, this variety of FTTP network does not allow the service provider to provide its customers with a 100 Mbits data transfer.