Monthly Archives: September 2014

GPONDoctor will organize a FTTH training week, starting on October 20th and with a duration of 5 labour days.

This edition will consist on two courses, one oriented to Fiber Optic communication and the second very intense on GPON protocol and services.

Both courses have been designed to have a balanced combination of theory and practice.

We will count with PhD Prof. Joseba Zubia who will lead the Fiber Optic communications course and with the experts from GPONDoctor team that will be in charge of the FTTH GPON course, sharing their experiences in conformance and interoperability testing.

Both courses will be hold in our premises in Spain. Address: Parque Tecnologico Bizkaia, ED 700. 48160, Zamudio (BIZKAIA). Spain.

Should you be interested to attend, please fill the "Registration Form" located at the end page of each course brochure and send it by email to:

enrique.areizaga@gpondoctor.com. 

Brochures of the courses can be downloaded from the links below:

Fiber Optic communications training course brochure

FTTH GPON training course brochure

A new U.S. study quantifies fibre to the home's contribution to jobs and the economy. It is well known that the Internet has been an economic catalyst, boosting productivity and innovation, creating jobs and raising incomes around the world. Numerous studies have documented the benefits of "the first transformative leap in Internet connectivity", as always-on broadband replaced dial-up. Now the preliminary results of a study carried out by consultancy firm Analysis Group for the FTTH Council Americas point to a definite and quantifiable impact of next-generation speeds.

Specifically, they studied communities in the U.S. with access to gigabit speeds – the sort of speed only available over a fibre network – representing a 100-fold increase in Internet throughput speeds for households and small businesses. The study examined the relationship between availability of gigabit broadband services and economic activity at the community level.

"The study results suggest that gigabit broadband communities exhibit a per capita GDP approximately 1.1 percent higher than the similar communities with little to no availability of gigabit services. In dollar terms, this suggests that the 14 gigabit broadband communities studied enjoyed approximately $1.4 billion in additional GDP when gigabit broadband became widely available" said Heather Gold, president of the FTTH Council Americas.

"Every community should be a gigabit community," she concluded.

Download a copy of the study

Interest in GPON and VDSL2 vectoring and gigabit fiber to the home (FTTH) in North America pushed worldwide sales of broadband aggregation equipment to $2.1 billion in the second quarter of 2014, according to Infonetics Research. The market research firm reports in its upcoming 2Q14 “PON, FTTH, and DSL Aggregation Equipment and Subscribers” report due August 29 that broadband aggregation equipment sales grew 17% sequentially and 19% year-over-year.

The rising tight floated all technology boats versus 1Q14, Infonetics says. Point-to-point Ethernet FTTH equipment sales jumped 45%, DSL aggregation gear revenues climbed 21%, and PON systems sales increased 15%. Within the PON segment, GPON sales grew 19% sequentially in 2Q14 and 44% from the year-ago quarter, sparked by the Chinese market.

VDSL port deployments grew to 6.6 million in 2Q14, thanks to interest in the Europe/Middle East/Africa market – and particularly in Europe – in vectoring deployments. Meanwhile, the North American market overcame its traditional first quarter doldrums to rebound in the second quarter. The onset of U.S. projects that will leverage dollars from the Connect America Fund is expected to boost the overall North American market later in the year.

Infonetics’ quarterly broadband aggregation report tallies worldwide and regional market size, market share, forecasts through 2018, analysis, and trends for EPON, GPON, FTTH, FTTB, PON, and DSL aggregation equipment and subscribers.

Currently operators in countries around the world are investing heavily in rolling out fiber broadband to subscribers, either directly with Fiber to the Home (FTTH) or through halfway houses such as Fiber to the Cabinet (FTTC), as in the UK. This is increasing subscriber speeds, with the US average connection speed hitting 10.5 Mbps in Q1 2014, according to research from Akamai. Globally, the average speed is 3.9 Mbps, with South Korea heading the table with 23.6 Mbps.

The broadband world in 2020

A recent study has found that by 2020, consumers and businesses will be demanding even faster download and upload speeds. The research, carried out by the Technical University of Eindhoven and Dialogic, predicts a need for 165 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload speeds in less than six years time. This is modelled on three main factors:

The growth in take up of existing services (such as music downloads and conversational applications, such as Skype)

Greater bandwidth needs for higher quality downloads (such as the advent of Ultra HD video, streamed across the Internet)

Future uses that have yet to be introduced; six years is a long time in the life of the Internet – bear in mind that YouTube only began in 2005, for example.

Is FTTC enough?

So, how can operators meet this need?

In the UK, BT is rolling out a national FTTC network, combining fiber with existing copper connections for the last drop, while Virgin Media's cable network is already FTTC-based. Other operators such as CityFibre and Hyperoptic are deploying FTTH within cities such as London, York, Peterborough, Cardiff and Newcastle.

Obviously a completely new FTTH network is more expensive than upgrading existing connections to FTTC. And, at the moment, FTTC can deliver the capacity that most consumers require, with download speeds of up to 80 Mbps with VDSL2 technology – although this can vary depending on the distance from the cabinet.

But can FTTC meet the needs of future consumers, given the predictions of demand from the University of Eindhoven report?

The short answer is not with current technology. However there is a lot of research work going on to increase FTTC capacity, with standards such as G.Fast (which promises to deliver speeds of 200 to 500 Mbps) being trialled in the lab. Whether this performance translates to the real world is yet to be seen, particularly as high speeds are only achievable over relatively short distances.

In contrast, FTTH networks obviously have the capacity to carry this growth in traffic now, providing comparatively unlimited bandwidth that scales for the future. In the US, Far East and other parts of Europe, more and more FTTH networks are being deployed, creating gigabit cities where everyone has access to high speed broadband, with a huge impact on the economy, public services and the daily lives of citizens. The risk is that many places in the UK will slip behind international competitors if they don’t have the networks in place to underpin growth.

See the complete text in 

http://blog.m2fx.com/is-fttc-enough-for-the-uk%E2%80%99s-future-superfast-broadband-needs?utm_campaign=Joe%27s%20posts&utm_content=7557855&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin