FTTH Fiber To The Home

[VickFury]

I currently am a fiber installer for one of the largest FTTH deployments in the USA. I would be willing to help anyone understand what goes into deploying this wonderful technology. In return I ask for a challenging and thought provoking environment. Who knows, maybe we can develop new science and technology here on these forums. Every good product started with an idea.

 

 

Thanks

 

Victor

aka

VickFury

agent of nothing

[JillSwift]

I'd love to hear about that. Would you care to give an overview of the technology?

[VickFury]

FTTH also known as fiber to the home is a way of delivering voice data and video to the customer home through a fiber optic network. Fiber optic lines terminate at the demarc point of the customer home. There are three main parts to this network. The central office (CO), the fiber distribution hub(FDH), and the optical network terminal (ONT). The CO takes voice data and video and combines them and sends them out on a single fiber strand to a 32port fiber splitter in the FDH. from there one of the 32 fiber lines continues to the customer home. The ONT usually sits outside where the utilities come in, tv, phone, and power. The ONT demuxes the 3 signals of voice, data, and video. From there regular phone is delivered and data and video goes in through coax much like cable tv would. The huge advantage of fiber is the amount of bandwidth available on a single fiber optic line is capable of pure uncompressed video signal capable of handling hundreds of HD channels, superfast internet with no latency, and excellent voice service.

 

It gets much deeper then that but I kept it simple so as not to bore the casual passer-by

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EDFA is a piece of equipment at the central office. It stands for Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifier. Erbium accelerates the fiber signal. Usually at 1550nm. The reason this is good is because this is an OOO amplifier. Optical optical optical. rather than Optical Electrical Optical. This costs too much to convert down and then back up. This erbium is an element usually found in scandanavia. I would like to hear from the photonics people.

[JillSwift]

EDFA is a piece of equipment at the central office. It stands for Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifier. Erbium accelerates the fiber signal. Usually at 1550nm. The reason this is good is because this is an OOO amplifier. Optical optical optical. rather than Optical Electrical Optical. This costs too much to convert down and then back up. This erbium is an element usually found in scandanavia. I would like to hear from the photonics people.

Oh, this is really intriguing. Where is the extra energy coming from?

[VickFury]

the erbium reacts when it is blasted with the laser making it a natural amplifier. the natural properties of erbium is extremely interesting. google up erbium or check it out on wikipedia.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erbium

[JillSwift]

the erbium reacts when it is blasted with the laser making it a natural amplifier. the natural properties of erbium is extremely interesting. google up erbium or check it out on wikipedia.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erbium

ooh. So, let's see if I have this straight. The erbium ions in the silica fiber are excited by the pump laser, and decay when the signal photons hit, releasing their own photons in the process thus resulting in an essentially new signal.

 

Am I badly off?

[swansont]

ooh. So, let's see if I have this straight. The erbium ions in the silica fiber are excited by the pump laser, and decay when the signal photons hit, releasing their own photons in the process thus resulting in an essentially new signal.

 

Am I badly off?

 

Yes, that's basically it, though I wouldn't say it's a new signal – it's the old signal but at a higher amplitude. Here's another wikipedia link

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_amplifier

 

We're using erbium-doped fiber amplifiers in our lab. You can frequency-double 1560 nm light and that gets you 780nm, which is where the D2 line of Rb is.

[bascule]

The CO takes voice data and video and combines them and sends them out on a single fiber strand to a 32port fiber splitter in the FDH. from there one of the 32 fiber lines continues to the customer home.

 

Aside from the fact this whole thing practically reads like an ad (although it seems to have created some interesting discussion)...

 

The way you describe that makes the voice component sound broadcast/multicast when voice conversations are almost always unicast.

 

Don't you do IP delivery of all these services? Is the video service something other than multicast IPTV?

[JillSwift]

*does 'learned something new today' dance*

 

This is cool. My father was a communications engineer for Mountain Bell, and he told me about the idea being kicked around of taking taking fiber down the last mile. One of the problems was the expense and inefficiency of amplification electronically (optical-electronic-optical, as Vic put it).

 

Now that this idea seems to be coming to fruition, it's cool to hear about how that was overcome. ==