In a message written on Sat, Feb 02, 2013 at 08:55:34PM -0500, Jay Ashworth wrote:
From: "Robert E. Seastrom" <rs@seastrom.com> There is no reason whatsoever that one can't have centralized splitters in one's PON plant. The additional costs to do so are pretty much just limited to higher fiber counts in the field, which adds, tops, a couple of percent to the price of the build.
Ok, see, this is what Leo, Owen and I all think, and maybe a couple others.
But Scott just got done telling me it's *so* much more expensive to home-run than ring or GPON-in-pedestals that it's commercially infeasible.
Note, both are right, depending on the starting point and goals. Historically teclos have installed (relatively) low count fiber cables, based on a fiber to the pedistal and copper to the prem strategy. If you have one of these existing deployments, the cost of home run fiber (basically starting the fiber build from scratch, since the count is so low) is more expensive, and much greater cost than deploying GPON or similar over the existing plant. However, that GPON equipment will have a lifespan of 7-20 years. In a greenfield scenario where there is no fiber in the ground the cost is in digging the trench. The fiber going into it is only ~5% of the cost, and going from a 64 count fiber to a 864 count fiber only moves that to 7-8%. The fiber has a life of 40-80 years, and thus adding high count is cheaper than doing low count with GPON. Existing builds are optimizing to avoid sending out the backhoe and directional boring machine. New builds, or extreme forward thinking builds are trying to send them out once and never again. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/