Small- to medium-sized businesses represent a relatively untapped, large, high margin opportunity for service providers that can deliver high bandwidth services. Telecommunication services for this segment are not a luxury, but rather a necessity. Therefore, the services are worth more and higher margins are available to the provider.
Delivering Ethernet over optical fiber is often the best method to deliver Ethernet services. With unlimited bandwidth support, noise immunity and the ability to traverse long distances, optical fiber can provide the performance for the applications of today and those envisioned for tomorrow. The MTU/MDU market located in MTUs normally requires data rates between T1 speeds (1.5Mbps) and 1Gbps. For these data rates, the most fiber efficient topology is Passive Optical Networking (PON). Active Ethernet (switching, routing) requires a transmit and a receive fiber for each customer; PON shares one fiber among up to 128 customers. PON is a point-to-multipoint optical access architecture that facilitates broadband communications between an optical line terminal (OLT) at the central office and multiple remote optical network units (ONUs) over a purely passive optical-distribution network with a reach of up to 70Km.
PON's most obvious benefit is that it uses significantly less fiber than other approaches. The same fiber can be shared by many buildings in the same vicinity without the cost of wave division multiplexing. Other benefits of PON include increased bandwidth compared to copper; large reductions in electrical use and cost; and reduced maintenance requirements. PON can be used in conjunction with existing DOCSIS management systems. Translation of DOCSIS management commands into Ethernet formats to manage EPON fiber access equipment is a new development in fiber access. This preserves investments in existing DOCSIS servers, software and procedures. The IEEE and the ITU-T are creating 10Gbps EPON and GPON standards so both technologies have a ultra high bandwidth upgrade path.