Chris Sowolla

"When PON architectures were first proposed for fiber-to-the-premises five years ago, the cost of active optoelectronic components was high enough to rule out active Ethernet switching in the last mile," said Chris Sowolla, vice president of business development at Occam."Times have changed.We're not arguing they've hit price parity with PON components, but it's much more reasonable to consider active Ethernet."

Sowolla said Occam was prepared to partner with a PON technology vendor to add PON fanout to its loop carrier, but reasoned that sharing bandwidth means that bandwidth is more limited and more asymmetric than in active systems.
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"There's ,a, preconceived notion that when people marry DSL and fiber services, it's always going to be PON-to-the-premises for cost reasons," Sowolla said.

"When PON architectures were first proposed for fiber to the premises five years ago, the cost of active optoelectronic components was high enough to rule out active Ethernet switching in the last mile," said Chris Sowolla, vice president of business development at Occam."Well, times have changed.We're not arguing they've hit price parity with PON components, but it's much more reasonable to consider active Ethernet."

Sowolla said Occam had been prepared to partner with a PON technology vendor to add PON fanout to its loop carrier, but said that sharing bandwidth always means that bandwidth is more limited and more asymmetric than in active systems.PON economics are based on an assumption of 32 subscribers, and depend on networks being fully loaded for effective deployment.

When active optics are used with a DSL distribution system, there are no splitter load-balancing issues to be resolved and bandwidth can be assigned based on service-level agreements.Carriers can make an inventory of lasers and transceivers and add optical ports on a finer-grained, more scaled basis.Active fiber to the premises can be combined with copper plant and used in conjunction with DSL access multiplexers in a more coherent fashion, Sowolla argued.

Occam has designed a system for line termination that can be configured as a blade for a loop carrier or as a standalone 1U box.
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"We hope to make a strong case for active optics as a natural adjunct to DSL," Sowolla said.