FTTX-how close to the end user should fiber come?

Summary form only given. The answer to the question is easy: In the end, optical fiber should come all the way into the home. Most scientists, industry engineers and economists will agree. The really big question is: How fast should it come to the home? Optical fiber is capable of transporting huge bandwidth over long distances. The figure-of-merit is the so-called bandwidth-distance product. The highest bandwidth-distance products experimentally demonstrated for single mode optical fiber are more than 1000 Tbit/s times km. In comparison the bandwidthdistance product for twisted pair copper and coaxial cable is in the range of 100 Mbit/s times km. With the ever-increasing demand for bandwidth the average amount of bandwidth used per end-user doubles every 2 years optical fiber is the only realistic end-solution to bring bandwidth to the home. However, if we only look at today´s immediate demand for bandwidth, it can be easily met with copper cable solutions or with hybrid fiber-copper networks. In this paper, the deployment technologies for fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) will be compared to other fiber-to-the-X (FTTX) approaches. Several architecture will be discussed, such as passive optical networks (PON), point-to-point networks, networks using multiple wavelengths (WDM-PON), and fiber-to-the-node or street cabinet. Besides a pure technology comparison, we will also review the roles of the communication services and service providers with respect to fiber roll-out.