With the rapid development and large-scale deployment of FTTH, the pace of “optical advancement and copper retrogression” and broadband acceleration has been increasing. As an important information infrastructure for the transformation of a digital society, fiber access networks have developed rapidly driven by the broadband strategy of each country. At the end of 2018, China’s broadband access users have exceeded 400 million, and 100 Mbps access has become popular in China. The popularity of broadband has greatly changed the way people live and work, and unleashed people’s imagination for more emerging services. Video service has become a basic fixed broadband service, replacing the VoIP service as an important revenue stream for operators, and stimulating the trial and deployment of 4K and 8K services. Yet, the high traffic feature of the video service has proposed new requirements for network architecture and equipment deployment, such as deploying equipment downward and gradually closer to users, Network cloudification and virtualization, smart home network, and fiber getting closer to users and gradually replacing copper. All these make all-fiber access a development trend.
During the process of fiber access network construction, small capacity OLTs are favored by large number of operators because of its compactness, lightweightness, strong environmental adaptability, and budget-friendly cost. Small capacity OLTs meet the trend of optical access node closer to users, diversified deployment scenario, higher bandwidth provisioning, and broader resources, as well as the requirements for economical and highly efficient network construction.
In network construction, large capacity OLTs and small capacity OLTs should be selected according to the actual situation and the network construction mode.
Table 1 Comparison between small capacity OLTs and large-and-middle capacity OLTs
With the advantages of more flexible deployment and stronger environmental applicability, small capacity OLTs are suitable for the scenarios such as limited room space, low-density area access, OLT remote and downward coverage, rapid access of smart industrial parks, and co-located OLT and mobile base station. At the same time, they provide more flexible uplink networking and protection capabilities to ensure service security and efficient service transmission.
Small capacity OLTs can be a 1U high pizza-box type box OLT, or a 2U high compact OLT. Box-type OLTs are generally a piece of fixed equipment with unpluggable line cards, and the cost is low; while 2U high OLTs generally provide carrier-grade protection as well as satisfactory power, fan, and main control card redundancy capabilities.
The following section analyzes the small capacity OLT application scenarios. We divide them into the low-density area coverage, remote area coverage, asset-light operator application, smart industrial park, commercial building access, and FTTM scenarios.
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