Moving Customers to 21st Century Service [Broadband]

The best medium for serving customers with video, voice and data in the late 20th Century was hybrid fibre-coaxial (HFC). Fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) is a newer and better technology, and is the service medium of the 21st Century. One of the impediments to implementing it, however, is the installed base of equipment managed by DOCSIS (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) based management systems. It is not reasonable to convert all of an HFC system to FTTH at one instance. Rather, the likely scenario will be to build system additions and to do major overhauls with FTTH, whilst continuing to operate adequate existing HFC systems. This dictates the use of a common management platform, and since DOCSIS was there first, it is logical that new FTTH systems conform to the DOCSIS management methods. Accordingly, US CableLabs have undertaken to define a way to implement DOCSIS management of EPON (Ethernet passive optical network) FTTH systems. This presentation describes the output of that work to-date, and discusses what else is necessary to achieve common management of DOCSIS and EPON systems. It also discusses architectural variations in FTTH systems, which can maximise the use of existing fiber, while minimising the amount of new fibre needed. By using a common management system, services may be migrated over time to the newer technology, without customer disruption and without re-training of personnel.