National Broadband Network reality

I think the operators/governments, both developed and developing, around the globe need to go back to the fundamentals and 1st principals in deploying broadband/Next Generation Access (NGA) networks. For that matter, most governments need to go back to fundamentals/1st principles in all that they do.

They need to think on the "purpose" of doing what they are doing/planning to do. If you continuously search for the purpose of the purpose and so on, then only you'll find what is actually required to be done. For example, take broadband. Why broadband? to have a high bandwidth delivered to homes. Why high bandwidth? to deliver more content/applications. Why more content/applications? for information (ex: Internet) and entertainment (ex: IPTV) delivery. Why information? to make the life convenient.

Ok. now, to make the life convenient, what else can we do other than providing broadband? I think the governments can do lot more things together with broadband to make peoples/citizens lives convenient. ex: good governance, public reforms etc. Is Fiber to the Home (FTTH) the only solution? The governments/operators need to broaden their solution space and take in to account all the possibilities and find the optimum solution, without being fascinated and misdirected by the hype. There's no need for you to follow, just because someone has done it.

Nothing is complex; you need right thinking, attitude and desire. If governments got that together with common sense and looking for purpose of all they do, they can.

Broadband: wired or wireless?

I always had this question in my mind; wired or wireless to reach the rural.

All the fixed line Communication Service Providers (CSPs) in both developing and developed countries have started their networks form the urban areas (ex: Main Switching Unit (MSU) in Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN)) and move to sub-urban (ex: Remote Switching Unit (RSU)) and then to rural (ex: Line Extension Unit (LEU)). For both copper and fiber, this has been the practice for the last 150 years. Even wireless CSPs have followed the same path first covering the urban, then sub-urban and then rural. Two of the most obvious reasons for this, is the demand and the affordability.

When it comes to broadband (BB), now we have 2 options wired or wireless. While there are methods to re-arrange an existing copper network by shortening the copper distance and introducing FTTN/C/B to deliver BB using ADSL2+/VDSL, the re-arrangement of wireless networks are not that feasible. To cover the green areas, the operators need to deploy new networks; copper, fiber or wireless.

As you move from the urban to rural, the population/house-hold density decreases, making the requirement of coverage large. The 2 options remain as fiber and wireless (ex: LTE). Deploying new copper is not a choice any more.

But the question is, once you reach the rural, both demand and affordability decreases, especially in developing countries. On the other side, the requirements are becoming more scattered in nature making wired networks prohibitive. Therefore the ideal choice is wireless, because of the less demand, less affordability and scattered nature.

So, the viability of FTTH is only applicable in urban/sub-urban areas where the required bandwidth is not deliverable even with the existing copper network re-arrangement as described above or the copper is outdated/degraded/old. For other areas (rural) wireless is the only viable options, especially for a developing country. Please keep in mind that the green areas will most of the time are rural.

For a case study, I'll take my own country as an example. The population of Sri Lanka, a developing country, as at March 2012 is 20.3 million (approx.) [1]. According to [2] 78% of the population lives in rural areas. If we assume a house hold has 4 people, the number of house-holds is 5 million (approx.). 78% of this is 4 Million (approx.).

But, according to countries regulator [3], as at March 2012, the number of fixed lines in Sri Lanka (including CDMA) is 3.6 million. However, we need to keep in mind that big corporates use hundreds of lines per location. Therefore, we cannot use 3.6 million for the calculation.

The point however is, 78% of the households/population are rural. To reach this we have to go with wireless. This is quite evident from the figures in [3], where the mobile penetration is 91% while the fixed line penetration is 18% (approx.). This 18% is actually the saturated figure of urban and sub-urban. But when the rural areas develop (when the demand and affordability increases) the 18% will increase as explained in my previous post. In [3], the Internet penetration is also high with mobile (if calculated, 4% approx.), whereas for fixed it's only 2%, if calculated. Obviously the BB is also will follow the same percentages.

On the other hand, the 78% includes large number of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), which are the main contributors to the country’s economy. For them to grow and the country to grow, the SMEs need Information Communication Technology (ICT) facilities. So the operators and the country have a great challenge to provide them the required services. Operators need to invest cautiously making sure they get positive Return-On-Investment (ROI) at the same time increase the footprint of their service coverage.

[1] http://www.statistics.gov.lk/
[2] 202.11.2.113/SEBM/ronso/no3_4/aruna.pdf
[3] http://www.trc.gov.lk/images/docs/statis_March_2012.doc

Future of wire-line access networks

Introduction

Communication Service Provider (CSP) networks can be divided into many categories. If divided based on the media used for the transport, wired and wireless are the widely known. Both types can be again sub divided based on the functional hierarchy; core, aggregation and access. If wired networks are concerned, optical fiber is used in almost all the core and aggregation networks because of its ability to carry/transport large amounts of data.

Wire line CSP access networks can be built using cable, copper or optical fiber. The cable based access networks are common in North America. Countries like Sri Lanka are more used to copper and fiber based access networks.

Access networks can again be classified based on the customer segment. While it is simple to have a single access network for both residential and business customers, some CSPs build different access networks for these 2 segments. The requirements and expectations of the 2 segments are different.

Design Criteria

A best practice in any access network design is to start with some forecasted marketing data. The networks that we build today should be future proof as far as possible in terms of service demand and technology used. For an example, for a residential triple play access network, it is better to have some figure on the number of customers per area, type of services required by those customers, the bandwidths consumed for each service and the bandwidth per house hold. Based on this information, we can find out the immediate bandwidth requirement per customer and the future demand. While there are many differences between fiber and copper based access networks, the fundamental difference is the ability of fiber to carry large amounts of data. Optical fiber networks in that sense are very much future proof.

It is always a good idea to design the networks for your real requirement rather than going behind various technologies. A technology used in United States (US) or Europe may not be able to directly deployed in countries like Sri Lanka.

The main decision factors when deciding on an access network technology/media are cost per user, bandwidth demand and demographic criteria. The current trend is to deliver more bandwidth per user in a secure way at lower cost.

Copper or fiber

If copper is already laid and available to the households, then it will be a good idea to use them if the required bandwidths can be delivered using them. The fundamental problem of copper based access is the decaying of speed with the distance. Most of today’s copper based access networks start from the Central Office (CO) of the CSP and goes to the customer. The access network is fully passive, consisting of, but not limited to, Main Distribution Frame (MDF), primary cable, Cabinet, secondary cable, Distribution Point (DP) and overhead cable. The popular Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technologies are struggling to deliver high bandwidths when the distance between the CO and the customer increases.

One solution is to use optical fiber, instead of copper. But the main problem of copper, as identified earlier, is the decaying of speed with distance. While it is accepted that the ideal solution is to have fiber, we can also try to shorten the copper length and deliver high bandwidths. This will save lot of cost as fiber is not freshly drawn.  This introduces a new term called FTTX, Fiber To The “place you want”. X could be building, home, curb/cabinet, node or even desk. So now the issue is between FTTH and FTTC/B.

Optical access networks

Optical access networks could be active or passive. An example of an Active Optical Network (AON) is Metro Ethernet or Carrier Ethernet. Here, active Ethernet switches are deployed in the network to deliver services, mainly to business customers. The networks mostly take the form of rings assuring high availability required by business critical applications.

The other category is Passive Optical Networks (PON).  PON works by delivering an end to end fiber access to the building or home. Though PON can be used for FTTC/N applications, most PON applications are based on FTTH/B architecture. Unlike AON, PONs have limited network protection in the last mile, because of its passive nature. PON works by dividing an optical signal into multiple fibers using a passive optical splitter. After the splitter, the network is liner and does not provide any direct protection. This type of a solution is mainly suitable for a residential rather than business.

The Table 1 below gives a snapshot of various PON technologies.

TDM PON			WDM PON	Hybrid TDM / WDM PON
ATM PON (APON) =Broadband PON(BPON) =A/B PON	Ethernet PON (EPON) = Gigabit Ethernet PON (GEPON )	Gigabit PON (GPON)
ITU-T G.983 standard	IEEE 802.3ah standard	ITU-T G.984 standard		Still at research stage
Developed from Telco side	Developed from Internet side	Evolved from A/B PON	Evolution from TDM PON
Layer 2 encapsulations are Ethernet and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM)	Layer 2 encapsulation is Ethernet	L2 encapsulations are GEM(GPON Encapsulation Method) for Ethernet and ATM
Maximum up stream is 155Mbps, Maximum downstream is 622Mbps	Maximum up stream and downstream is 1.25Gbps	Maximum up stream and downstream is 2.5Gbps	Maximum up stream and downstream is 10 Gbps
Deployments: US (ex: Verizon FiOS)	Deployments: Japan (ex: NTT, KDDI), Korea (ex: KT), China, India	Deployments: US (ex: AT&T), Europe	Deployments: Korea (ex: KT), China

Table 1. PON technology comparison.

TDM PON is the current choice because of its low cost. Out of the available TDM PON technologies, GPON has much better multi-service capabilities and carrier grade management capabilities and therefore the winning technology. It is also future proof, because of its high bandwidth support.