TECHNICAL
by JEFF BROWN, Director, Product & Segment Marketing, Calix & JACK BURTON, Principal, Broadband Success Partners Powering the Plant: HFC versus FTTH
With this explosive level of adoption taking place, operators are clearly making the decision to place big bets on FTTH & PON as the access technology of choice for the coming decades. But pulling the trigger and making these investments require solid business cases and ROI justification. Beyond the technology benefits driven by FTTH PON, there must be compelling economic factors motivating aggressive moves by large numbers of operators. While much has been written about the comparative capital costs of constructing these upgrades and new networks, less has been discussed documenting the ongoing operating costs, which over the life of the investment make up the bulk of the overall network expense. We all know, intuitively, that fibre should cost far less than metallic networks in terms
Introduction As subscribers continue to demand more and more network bandwidth, operators of hybrid-fibre-coax (HFC) networks have some big decisions to make. Should they upgrade their plant to a next-generation HFC architecture, or deploy a Fibre- to- the-Home (FTTH) architecture leveraging passive optical networks (PONs)? Over the last 12-18 months, adoption of 10G XGS-PON has grown at a 4x-5x rate year over year as operators are increasingly choosing to deploy fibre- based PON networks. We see operators deploying 10G PON in a greenfield mode for new markets/coverage areas, or as an overlay in an existing market to address near-term network needs while future proofing the network and facilitating their migration from HFC over time.
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Volume 47 No.1 MARCH 2025
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