Passive Optical LAN: Why All the Hype? - A Comprehensive Analysis

The surging demand for consumer-driven high bandwidth applications for the residential market, such as HDTV, 3-D TV, video on demand, IPTV, gaming etc., has led to a large scale global investment and deployment of Fiber To The Home (FTTH) networks. Almost exclusively, these networks run over single-mode optical fiber cabling. The bandwidth potential and distance capabilities of single-mode fiber give the service providers much greater cost savings and flexibility to deploy these newer high bandwidth applications in comparison to the older traditional copper based networks. The demands placed on service providers today are quite different than in the past.