Last Mile Design

Sat Feb 9 06:22:47 UTC 2019

On Fri, 8 Feb 2019, Chris Gross wrote:

> For a lot of us, PONs are a way of life and may not even have any 100G 
> capable devices in our network, muchless enough to make our money on. 
> While you may be so "lucky" to "never really take it seriously", it is 
> supporting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of homes in the US.
>
> PON is the lifeblood if many rural communities. I'm luckily to have a 
> healthy mix of PON and AE operations since I'm located next to cities. 
> But I've met cooperatives in the middle of no where with super low 
> density where it's 6 people + 2 donkeys on staff. AE would never work 
> there, but PONs allow them cheap and available broadband options.
>
> Unless someone wants to give enough funding to run AE to people's homes, 
> PONs will continue to allow many communities to have more than cellular 
> internet access options, if that.

PON and AE both have their strengths and weakness and make sense for 
different deployment scenarios. My biggest problem with PON is that it 
seems some operators build their fiber plant for PON for all deployment 
cases and then it's extremely hard to back out of it and switch to AE. If 
you have AE you can switch to PON fairly easily, but not the other way 
around if you've put splitters in the manholes.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se