Fibre-to-the-Hut: Research into tailored FTTH solutions for Africa

Next-generation FTTH technology is aggressively being developed and deployed in Europe, Asia and in the USA. Countries like Japan with high per-capita income and high-density residential complexes remain at the forefront of FTTH and WDM-PON developments. The majority of African countries face unique socio-economic challenges, along with sprawling population distributions. As such, there is a need to develop network technologies, network architectures and business models applicable to the African case. In this presentation we discuss these issues and present potential solutions. We further show our experimental results of how low-cost Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers (VCSELs) are suited to long-reach 4.25 Gbps access networks in the African context. This work is part of a new and exciting project “Fibre-to-the-Hut: Researching Novel FTTH Solutions for Africa”, currently being launched by the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University.