My preference, for the home, would be Active-E. But I do understand the economics that may support PON, and my position on that has softened over the years. My service provider delivers their FTTH service to me via PON, and for the most part, it's been all good.

That said, I was particularly impressed with what CDE Lightband did in Clarksville, Tennessee, where they deployed their FTTH network with Active-E using Brocade to over 60,000 subscribers:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV1nYGl_Bjc

If I had to build a consumer broadband network and had the budget (and owned the fibre) to do so, I'd definitely always choose Active-E:   

In South Africa, we have an access network operator that uses Active-E primarily to deliver their service, making it perhaps the only FTTH provider not using PON to do this. I find this quite fascinating.

Mark.

On 9/Feb/19 12:59, Ben Cannon wrote:
I should probably have mentioned that in this sense I view “urban” as exclusive to “single family homes” - meaning I’m talking about high density modern urban with under grounding requirements - and high rise residential towers.

We are the opposite, we are presently enterprise, midsize, and exotic-small business only, and have no residential arm or support structure (or SLA expectations, or standards or lack thereof) of a residential connection.

-Ben.

-Ben Cannon
CEO 6x7 Networks & 6x7 Telecom, LLC 



On Feb 9, 2019, at 2:54 AM, Baldur Norddahl <baldur.norddahl@gmail.com> wrote:

PON in urban areas absolutely makes sense. Maybe less in a high rise area, where each building can have a small building wide network of its own. But it in areas with single family homes PON is king.

Our POPs can have up to 10 000 customers each. All on a single 96 fiber strand cable leading into the POP building. We have extra ducts, but nothing that would allow us to change that to a point to point network. That would require 100x that 96 fiber cable.

With extra ducts it would be possible to rebuild from PON to point to point. But it would require massive investments. Basically you would have to invest all that we saved by building PON. For starters, you would have to have many more POPs.

And yes, there are splitters in the hand holes. This is not what stops you from rebuilding from PON. It is the fact that we never paid for extra fiber. The backbone in a sub area is typically build with a 24 fiber strand cable. Because fibers are not free and are actually quite expensive as the number of fibers grow and the distances get longer. We can do a few point to point connections, for example if we need to deliver a commercial service or for our own needs (to connect POPs etc).

We are not big on commercial services. But if we were, I would use WDM splitters for that. Or the long awaited 10G PON if that ever arrives and turns out at a price point that works.

Regards,

Baldur