re: in pursuit of an optical digital solution, a substitution for RF-based HFC plant
Hello Dave,
I've given some additional thought to the last mile message trunking/packaging scheme that would be suited for an all optical residential distribution environment, similar to the one we've discussed in recent months. That is, one that would serve as a substitution for coaxial and HFC models which now employ RF and various forms of analog FDM, and the like. The digital solution, in other words.
I've surmised, rather precariously I should add, that a suitable solution may have been staring us right in the face, all along: optically-bridged (aka switched) 10GbE, and then at some point in time, in the more distant future, this could be increased to 100GbE if (ah... make that, when) needed.
I know that this sounds outLANdish, but with some additional work on frame sizing and parsing of message blocks to pick off voice, data and video, consdider the head start that Ethernet has over anything else in existence, much less anything that would need to be developed, anew, from scratch. This has been perhaps Ethernet's strogest suit, to date, and one of the reasons that it has defeated FDDI, Token Ring and ATM in many other decisions where issues surrounding extensibility and the leveraging of existing expertise and infrastructure have been the concern.
These Ethernet forms should ultimately suffice for all media delivery forms without the need to re-invent the wheel, again. It could be a shared medium 10GbE at first using collision avoidance principles, and then migrated to individual user (account) segments as the state of the art improves. Such a strategy would take into account increasing demand over time, while tracking the progress of the photonics labs.
It'll take some considerable strides in waveguide development at the dwdm chip level to bring this to the level of switching that would be needed to guarantee individual user segmentation in a "transparent" way, but I believe that this is where optical is going now, anyway. What do you and others here think?
Regards, Frank Coluccio |
