Optical Access Technology for High-speed Broadband Services

Recently, fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) to support high-speed broadband services has been spreading widely and the number of FTTH contracts has passed 20 million in Japan. There are high expectations that optical access networks will become even faster and handle larger amounts of data so that they can be used for services that deliver high-resolution images, for peer-to-peer (P2P) services, and as a way to remove load for mobile services that are becoming increasingly faster. It is also hoped that these networks will serve as infrastructure to help cope with the improving quality of various services and help provide new cloud services. We have been providing a mass production-based GE-PON product supporting this popular FTTH and developed the 10G-EPON system, which applied ASICs of the main PON processing functions, and also an equipment power-saving mechanism based on the IEEE standard. Through this technological development, we are going to cope with demands for high-speed and large-capacity FTTH access networks. This paper describes the trends of standardization and technological development in next-generation optical access networks, and presents our approach to future work from the viewpoint of these trends and based on system development.