Compared to the traditional approach, you will only have one centralized
GPON switch to manage. All the small ONT switches are managed through
this. Complaints about the interface is vendor specific. Because there is only
one centralized switch, it would be fairly cheap to switch vendor. Much cheaper
than to rewire with copper in any case.
Except you won’t have one central GPON switch because LANs change
incrementally.
In my experience, a PON network is extremely flexible. Our FTTH network is ever expanding and there is no master plan. Whenever people in existing areas decide to buy our product or whenever people in a new area decides to take a vote to get us in their area, the network will expand as needed. Often we will discover that we could not make a planed crossing because of something in the ground, but we can just change plans and do it another place. We have a competitor that decided to use p2p (point to point ethernet over fiber) instead and I have watched how they are struggling because they had to plan everything from the outset, and we didn’t. The reason being that we use very little fiber for our backbone and can afford to change plans constantly. They need to backhaul hundreds or thousands of fiber strands to the central point, where they have the switches.
That throwback in office 412 with the fax machine? Can’t simply buy
him a pots line. You get to futz with fax over the converged phone
system.
GPON is actually ATM and will provide hard realtime bandwidth guarantees. ISDN delivery over GPON is part of the standard. You will reserve 2x64 Kbit/s channels and GPON guarantees that will always be 100% available with no dropped frames and no jitter. You can do fax, modems, anything that the public phone service will carry over ATM.
I have not personally tried this out as fax and modems are completely dead in my part of the world and nobody cares. But I have had a ONT (from Zhone no less) with ISDN ports (not POTS) and thought they are crazy.
Speaking of the converged phone system, you’re now committed to VoIP
on a VLAN. When you decide you want to switch to a physically
separated network for the phones, well, that’s too bad because your
cabling infrastructure doesn’t make that possible.
Nothing stops you from deploying two independent GPON networks, one for ISDN service and the other for data service. Typically the drop cables will be at least 2 fibers (GPON runs on a single fiber) so you would not need to change anything. In my example the backbone would need a maximum of 7 fibers. With a duplicated GPON network, that would be 14 fibers in the backbone.
Personally I think duplicated networks are silly. But who am I to decide?
The AV lab gets screwed. You’re running the coax they need through the
noisy electrical riser because you didn’t build dedicated comms risers
and closets. Naturally nobody checked with them so you don’t yet
realize they can’t do what they need to do with video over IP
equipment.
Fiber will transmit anything that goes on coax as analog signals. Typically on 1550 nm. The converters are dead cheap and are purely analog devices.
This is how we deliver TV on a FTTH GPON network. GPON uses 1310 nm for upstream data, 1490 for downstream data and 1550 nm for analog TV. When I say analog TV that is really DVB digital signal these days, but the equipment does not know any of that and just transmits it as an analog signal. Many GPON ONT for residential use come with a coax TV out port that can be turned on and off remotely, so the ISP can control TV delivery. Some also have build in filters that can be remote controlled, so you can have multiple TV packages using the usual system of filtering frequencies on the coax.
And what will you do in 5 years when they want the computer lab in 204
upgraded to 100Gig? Maybe run some fiber all the way back to the
campus head end because as expensive as that is, it’s still cheaper
than replacing the OLT with 100-gig capable equipment and then
replacing all the ONTs in the building because oops, there’s no 100
gig OLT compatible with the old ONTs and you’d have to take the
building down for a week to forklift-upgrade the whole mess.
One advantage of a fiber to the desktop solution is that you have fiber to every room. You just move a drop cable from the splitter and to a pair of backbone fibers. With this you can get a dedicated connection from any room to any other room including back to your data center. Yes you will have extra dark fibers available, anything else would be stupid.
Folks have advised Nick rip it out now because they foresee the
slow-motion train wreck on its way. That may be extreme, but certainly
he should take immediate action to preserve his options. For example,
I would demand the creation of comms closets and risers before the
building opened and I’d threaten to quit if they weren’t. At least
then the inevitable modifications can be structured and planned
instead of turning in to an ad-hoc mess.
This is out of line IMHO. Hopefully they did add in extra conduits so you could do some special cable runs (including some copper and coax), if needed. But if they did not, it would be the responsibility of management, not yours. It also has nothing to do with fiber nor GPON. Plenty of copper builds have a severe lack of space for future proving.
If they did the fiber build in the recommended way, there will be ducts prepared for fiber blowing, so one quickly can add more fiber cabling.
I find it silly to threaten to quit if they wont make closets, that are then going to be empty.
Regards,
Baldur
