Fiber to the home-technology and architecture drives

The authors present a technology and architecture perspective for evolving today´s copper access network optimized for POTS (plain old telephone service) to a fiber access network providing both narrowband and broadband services. Architectures are assessed using application studies on actual routes in Bell Canada. Two architectures emerge as serious candidates (i.e., competitive with copper) for providing POTS service in the year 1992: the double star and the star-bus. Tradeoffs between these architectures relating to POTS and broadband upgrade are discussed