CAPEX can be greatly diminished by introducing ONUs from different manufacturers. This requires that any OLT is capable to interact with any ONT regardless of its manufacturer. Intrinsic characteristics of XGS-PON networks need to be addressed to ease the interoperability among manufacturers:
- Commercial implementations from different versions of the standard.
- Problems during the activation process. ONUs identified from a manufacturer different from the OLT not accepted.
- Misinterpretation of the standard.
- OMCI, a very broad standard. Especially concerning “Vendor Specific entities”.
- Heterogeneity among operators regarding “IP Services” provisioning.
Furthermore, the structure of a PON network is a fiber that is split over using optical power dividers or splitters. The degree of splitting indicates that the percentage of optical power arriving at an ONT. Attenuation is key to be kept under control to avoid that some of the network active elements operate under stress conditions.
All these factors imply a great challenge in the deployment of XGS-PON networks.
GPON-Doctor™ 9500 analyzes traffic within an FTTH network according to the ITU-T standards. Moreover, its automatic calibration and built-in touch screen into a high-performance chassis make it possible to get a full capture and analysis of XGS-PON network traffic in just one-click.
GPON-Doctor™ 9500 has several captures modes, from a “Full capture” to get all control and management traffic for in-depth troubleshooting to “Real-Time” that allows captures over long time periods to identify deviations from expected behavior. The information captured can also be shared with other experts that can analyze it in their own computers using the GPONDoctor™ software.
The analysis software interprets the captured information and translates it into a graphical and categorized format that can be easily used for in-depth analysis of XGS-PON protocol compliance, interoperability evaluation, bandwidth assignments, and field deployment troubleshooting.
GPON-Doctor™ 9500 allows clear-text user traffic extraction in real-time for both upstream and downstream. The traffic is extracted at the Ethernet layer.
This traffic can be further analyzed by upper-layer protocol analyzers, either external or by a software network protocol analyzer installed within the GPONDoctor™.
The combination of the GPONDoctor with a traffic generator and, an external or internal analyzer that incorporates GPON-Doctor 9500, is a powerful setup to validate the correct transmission of “IP services” over the network.
This feature can be also used to regenerate IP services inside GPONDoctor™: IPTV channels, VoD flows, reproduce voice stream in realtime so as to analyze their QoS & QoE and identify “Services” degradations.