PONdering the Access Network

The access network is the connection between the telephone in your home and the local exchange. It is the first step of a customer’s connection to the rest of the national telephone network. Traditionally this connection is a twisted pair of copper wires, which is adequate for telephone calls, but the wide scale introduction of the Internet is placing higher bandwidth demands on the entire network. The optical core network has a near unlimited bandwidth, and PCs are now running at gigabit speeds highlighting the ‘bottle neck’ caused by standard 56kbit/s or at most 512kbit/s connections over the copper lines in the current access network. This paper will explain how this ‘bottle neck’ can be removed forever by the introduction of optical networking techniques into the access network.