Future Access Technologies
Passive Optical Networking (PON)
- Also called Fiber to the Home
- Potential of optical fiber communications to end users
- Possibility of thousands of channels (with WDM)
- Doesn’t require electricity, thus “passive”
- Limits its maximum distance (about 10 miles)
- No standards yet
Ethernet to the Home
- Yipes.com is now doing this in several large US cities
- Gives home users 10BaseT or 100BaseT connections
- A TCP/IP router installed into the customer’s network connect to an Ethernet MAN
- No protocol conversion required