Passive fibre-loop architecture providing both switched and broadcast transport

The authors report the experimental demonstration of a new passive-fibre-optic subscriber loop architecture. The architecture provides each of 16 subscribers with a dedicated, two-way broadband channel for switched services, as well as with an array of broadcast video channels. The dedicated channels are provided via 16-channel dense wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM), and the broadcast channels are transported over the same loop fibre via FM subcarrier multiplexing. A number of potential advantages of this hybrid (switched/broadcast) approach are foreseen.