Thanks, Frank for the notes and references. The whitepapers there are quite good, and have a lot of
traffic information: the site is worthy of being bookmarked.
Yes, I'm mostly concerned about the residence. I was just wondering if there was some reason why
anyone might do point to point fiber to the home, and I guess there isn't one yet.
PON/ATM doesn't impress me at the moment either, since it doesn't seem to have been designed with
broadcast TV in mind- by the way, I would say the bandwidth is spilt, rather than shared in PON
networks.
I'm not worried about enterprises, since they have a lot more management capability and can handle
options- 10G sounds good for that, particularly if it is point to point full duplex if they have high traffic.
But ATM sounds good. SONET sounds good. HDSL sound good. Frame Relay is dominate, and is
still good too. T1 ditto. Air is good, if you are in the right climate. Whatever works, and is offered at
the right price. The interesting areas, in my opinion, are secure VPN, video conferencing, VOIP for
internal network calling, and other value added services.
You are correct about DOCSIS not being standard ethernet- I'm looking at the DOCSIS 1.1 to try
to understand this area. Subject to this analysis, I think I've gotten enough information to make a
tentative posting on the Last Mile thread about my concern on whether HFC networks can handle the
necessary services; I just wanted to eliminate point to point fiber and PON in the US for the near term (5
year future). Your previous thread comments on the 'lightwire' cable architecture are also helpful here.
So it's clear I'm focusing on HFC as the solution to the last mile, though I suppose you could still have a
10G shared access to a small number of homes (50, like lightwire) using multicasting for TV, and thence
to a DWDM neighborhood 10G switch, so I shouldn't eliminate that possibility entirely- I await the
outcome of the World Wide Packets Grant County Washington PUD trial you referenced with great
interest.
It seems to me now that the cost points on DWDM, particularly environmentally hardened 100+ channel
DWDM, are critical to last mile cable (or possibly 10G) deployment success. |
