With the aim of reducing the ONTs price it is important that any OLT is capable to interact with any ONT regardless its manufacturer. However, GPON has a number of intrinsic characteristics that could make difficult the interoperability among manufacturers:
- Commercial implementations from earlier versions of the standard.
- Problems during the activation process.
- Misinterpretation of the standard.
- OMCI, a very broad standard.
- Heterogeneity among operators.
Furthermore, the structure of a PON network is a fiber that is divided over using optical power dividers or splitters. At this point it appears the concept of “degree of splitting”, defined as the number of divisions that suffers the fiber to reach an ONT. The degree of splitting indicates that the percentage of optical power arriving to an ONT. Attenuation in a GPON circuit can be very high due to the sum of fibre splitting, connectorization (Insertion loss), fusion splice, and distance in the fiber, and thus, some of the network active elements operate under stress conditions.
All these factors imply a great challenge in the deployment of GPON networks.
The GPON-Doctor™ 4000 transparently analyze traffic within a FTTH network. Moreover, its automatic calibration and built-in touch screen into a high performance chassis, makes it possible with just one click to have a full capture of GPON network traffic.
The capture can be very long (e.g. 30 minutes) and exportable to be used out of the GPON-Doctor™ equipment.
The analysis software interprets the captured data and translates it into a graphical and categorized format that can be easily used for in-depth analysis of GPON protocol compliance, interoperability evaluation, bandwidth assignments and field deployment troubleshooting.
GPON-Doctor™ 4000 allows clear-text user traffic extraction in real-time for both upstream and downstream. The traffic is extracted at Ethernet layer.
This traffic can be further analysed by upper layer protocol analyzers, either external or by a software network protocol analyzer installed within the GPON Doctor™.
The combination of the GPON Doctor with a traffic generator and, an external or internal analyzer that incorporates GPON-Doctor 4000, is a powerful setup to verify the correct transmission of data over the network.
This feature can be also used to regenerate services inside GPON Doctor™: Watch Multicast Video flows, hear sound of voice services in realtime, analyze QoS & QoE.