What is FTTx?

As demand for data speed and capacity continues to go through the roof, wire line service providers are recognizing that traditional copper wire can’t satisfy these expectations on its own. Optical fiber transmission, already present on many long haul routes, will have to be used. But with typical costs of some $2,000 per subscriber to deliver fiber to the home, the high cost and long payback period make this commercially unviable.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could find a way to provide the benefits of fiber to the majority of customers without incurring such high costs?

FTTx is a family of solutions that solves this dilemma and balances the high cost of fiber deployment with the market price of the service delivered. FTTx is a general term describing where some part of the local copper access wiring is replaced by fiber. This includes FTTC (Fiber to the Cabinet), FTTB (Fiber to the Building) and FTTH (Fiber to the Home). Typically, a short run of wire remains for each customer – a few tens or hundreds of meters – consolidated in a street side or basement cabinet where the fiber terminates. The shortened length of wire, far less than the kilometers common in many DSL deployments, means that rates of 40 to 100Mbit/s are easily achievable with low contention from other users.

Some countries are making substantial investments in a common nationwide FTTx infrastructure. In many other countries, you can find individual service providers rolling out their own upgrades. It is clear that this architecture is both popular and commercially viable, with growing worldwide adoption.

Planning the build-out of FTTx

The transition to FTTx offers the wire line service provider an ideal opportunity to introduce modern and efficient OSS planning and design tools. Each duct, new fiber and termination point can be planned, design and validated during the build process.

The scale of the task should not be underestimated. Some very large investments are required to upgrade access to millions of customers, enabling a wide range of new services. Planning tools which combine knowledge of the physical ducting, cabling and equipment with the customer premises served are essential to ensure efficient and effective deployment. Although such systems can be retro-fitted, there are obvious benefits by using such tools from the outset.

Rapid Fulfillment

With accurate inventory data in place, automated fulfillment can transform the provisioning cycle from days to minutes. Capacity management ensures that bandwidth is not over-provisioned and that customers are not sold services which cannot be delivered.

While the budgets for FTTx investment can be very large – often in the billions of dollars – the associated OSS investments required to maximize it are comparatively small. It’s essential not to overlook these, otherwise customers may find that the high speed and heavily marketed service is slow to be delivered and does not match customer expectations.

Other telecom technologies also affecting OSS investments include LTE, Ethernet and IP.