Passive fibre local loop for telephony with broadband upgrade

A new and potentially economic method has been identified to serve small business customers (say less than 20 lines) and eventually the residential market via an all-fiber access network. The target is to provide a fiber network justified solely on the basis of known services such as telephony while laying down a fiber infrastructure that can support a wide range of new services from telemetry to CATV and b-ISDN. The solution lies in sharing a single-mode feeder fiber from the exchange over several customers premises using a number of passive optical splitters in the street network. Time-division multiple access is used initially on one wavelength to support telephone while other wavelengths will be used later to support future service upgrade including broadband