Christmas came early this year for

Nashville conference Cost-Cutting Technologies Take Center Stage in Nashville Ever-lower costs for electronics are a given. But this year’s FTTH Coun...
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Nashville conference

Cost-Cutting Technologies Take Center Stage in Nashville Ever-lower costs for electronics are a given. But this year’s FTTH Council annual conference showed the way to astonishing cuts in labor and materials costs. A BBP Staff Report

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hristmas came early this year for deployers of rural networks – suddenly the standard network business cases that required densities of 8 to 12 homes passed per mile look good at 6 to 8. That’s an astonishingly large cost cut for a technology as mature as fiber. And the gifts kept coming in Nashville – new twists for customer-premises equipment, inside plant and urban deployments, too. In an environment that is suddenly very short of capital, the timing could not have been better. The first Santa came from an unlikely place – Japan. And indeed, it looks like a toy. A Slinky spring, to be exact. It’s the Xtendo Coil from Misaku Densetu Co. Ltd. (www.k-m-d.com) and it cuts the labor cost of an aerial fiber deployment roughly in half. A two-person crew can do in two weeks about the same work a three-person crew using traditional fiber lashing methods would need three weeks to handle. Crews spend less time suspended in a cherry-picker bucket as well, adding to safety. What looks like a “Slinky” is actually a steel spring, galvanized and aluminized, and coated with a tough low-friction resin. Experience with deployments in Japan – including harsh-weather Hokkaido – confirm that it repels snow and ice. It comes in three sizes, with inside diameters of 60, 80 or 100 mm. The deployment equipment (simple coneshaped anchors to deploy at the right pitch, clamps to permanently attach cables, and an electric-drill-powered rotating rod to string the coil onto exist-

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This lashing system for aerial fiber from Japan attracted a great deal of interest from contractors and rural deployers. ing suspended cable) is simple, too. The cost is about 16 cents per deployed foot, which should lead to an overall 15 to 20 percent savings. Calix (www.calix.com) was the second Santa – the first major vendor to take advantage of the ITU’s pathway to longer GPON range. At base, the technology is simple. Calix is offering carefully tuned new pluggable optical interface modules for existing OLT cards in its C7 series Multiservice Access Platform. The new modules work with Calix 700, 700G, and 700GX ONTs and extend GPON range to as much as 20 miles from the central office. The old GPON standard is supposedly good for 12 miles, at least for digital (non-RF) signals. (See box at right.) This is a 60 percent increase in distance and almost triples the potential service area from a single CO to over

3,000 square kilometers – about 1,000 square miles. The modules sell at a $200 premium. Calix recommends the signal be split no more than 1:16, which is not much of a penalty in the sparsely populated areas where this technology is meant to be deployed. And the gift? Calix clearly puts at risk the sales of its components for extra local COs and points of presence. In rural areas, that sort of build often requires $30,000 or more per POP, and a single POP might serve just a few hundred residents. It seems hard to imagine making up those lost sales quickly, except by thinking about all the new networks that are suddenly economical to build. We expect USDA certification quickly. Facing a tough urban build? Wondering about the feasibility of replacing your coax plant? A useful European tech-

| BROADBAND PROPERTIES | www.broadbandproper ties.com | November 2008

Nashville conference

Calix Extends the Reach of Rural Fiber Two products announced at the FTTH Conference by Calix (www.calix.com) promise to change the economics of fiber deployment for rural providers. Calix is the leading FTTH electronics vendor in the rural telco market (see “Independent Telcos Continue to Lead the Fiber Revolution” in this issue), and its new products, which are available now, are certain to appeal to this group of deployers. The Extended Reach GPON  solution takes advantage of amendments to the ITU-T GPON standards that allow service providers to dramatically increase their serving areas. Calix is delivering this functionality as a pluggable optical interface module (OIM) inserted into the existing optical line terminal (OLT) line cards on the Calix C7 Multiservice Access Platform. The solution works with all Calix 700, 700G, and 700GX optical network terminals (ONT), including those already deployed, so providers do not need to replace customer-premises equipment. Calix decided to use pluggable optics in the line cards, rather than changing out OLTs and ONTs, because this approach was seamless, cost-effective and efficient. With the Extended Reach GPON, service providers can address subscribers beyond the 20 km (12.4 mile) serving-area radius that had formerly limited the technology, without the expense of constructing and powering remote cabinets. This is especially beneficial to service providers operating in low-density areas. “Some [North American service providers]…who are deploying in rural areas had to choose between paying high costs to reach remote customers or excluding some customers from their FTTP deployment plans,”  said Donovan Prostrollo, solutions marketing director of Calix. “Calix Extended Reach GPON redefines how rural service providers can economically deliver FTTP services to these customers.” Extended Reach GPON extends the reach of GPON from 20 km (12.4 miles) to 33 km (20.5 miles), greatly increasing the service area addressable by a GPON OLT. It also significantly reduces costs by consolidating the number of central offices required. According to Geoff Burke, director of marketing at Calix, each additional powered cabinet that a telco has to install to support an outlying area typically costs between $30,000 and $50,000. This can amount to hundreds of dollars per customer. The other new product announcement was Calix’s 700GX family of optical network terminals (ONTs), which support active Ethernet in addition to the GPON and BPON standards. These  ONTs employ auto-detect technology, first introduced in 2007 to enable Calix customers to deploy BPON or GPON over the same ONT. Calix has now extended this technology to add active Ethernet support. While GPON is favored for mass residential and small business deployments, active Ethernet is often preferred

for larger businesses that need dedicated fiber access. The new ONTs give service providers the flexibility to implement either technology on a single ONT. This allows service to deliver and manage PON and active Ethernet technologies as a single network rather than separate networks. “PON and Active Ethernet have falsely been cast as competitive technologies when, in fact, they are complementary,” said David Russell, solutions marketing director, Calix. “With the 700GX ONT, Calix is the first company to allow service providers an operationally and capitally efficient way to leverage the strengths of both technologies out of the same ONT.” Benefits of the new Calix 700GX ONT include: Providers can remotely provision and convert subscribers (usually business subscribers) from GPON to active Ethernet or vice versa without expensive truck rolls or equipment changes at the customer premises. In active Ethernet mode, the 700GX can reach subscribers up to 40 km (24.8 miles) distant, enabling service to hard-to-reach customers. Service providers need to inventory only one ONT for all common standards: active Ethernet, BPON, and GPON. Service providers can plan to convert the entire network to active Ethernet, to meet growing bandwidth needs in the future, without changing the customerpremises equipment. “We are a big believer in GPON for most residential and business services, but we are seeing increasing demand and opportunity for delivering dedicated, symmetrical Ethernet services to our business customers,”  said Zack Odell, director of operations at SCTelecom in Medicine Lodge, Kansas. “With the 700GX ONT, we have the flexibility to deploy and manage one network, independent of the service or technology demanded. Not only does this greatly simplify our network and inventory management, but also the integrated active Ethernet support saves us thousands of dollars per Calix pays special attention to tuning the filters on the pluggable opbusiness site relative to tical interface module, and careful how we historically had testing, to up the range of its OLT to implement dedicated, card. The extra cost, about $200, is symmetrical, fiber-based spread across the recommended 1:16 split – for about $12 a customer. Ethernet services.”

November 2008 | www.broadbandproper ties.com | BROADBAND PROPERTIES |

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Nashville conference nology has made it to North America. With Kabel-X (www.kabelxusa.com) you can reuse copper infrastructure as fiber ducts. Here’s how it works: 1. Dig down to the cable and cut into the sheath to expose the conductor. The technology can handle almost any wire size from coax to large power cables. 2. Lubricate the conductor wire by pumping in a special fluid. 3. Using Kabel-X equipment, clamp to the conductor and winch it out of the sheath. Up to 1,000 feet of cable can be pulled at one time, although shorter lengths are more common. 4. Use the now-empty cable sheath as a duct for deploying new fiber. The recovered metal conductor can, of course, be sold for scrap. The process requires a three-person crew. Another gift came from PacketFront (www.packetfront.com) – a modular CPE ONT and media gateway. There’s some assembly required, and that’s actually a good thing. The final installation can be handled by low-level installers, and even by homeowners (see more details in News this month). A wide range of new “inside plant” refinements enabled by bend-insensitive

PacketFront’s new modular ONT starts with an interface plate installed by a professional (top of frame, with its covering plate to the left). A basic ONT with a wide variety of optional features and interfaces can be snapped on. The fully installed unit (right) looks good inside a dwelling unit. and bend-tolerant fiber made their appearances – everything from clever (and small) boxes and cassettes to ever-smaller hubs and ducts. INDUSTRY VISIONS Jack Field, vice president of product management for ADC’s Global Connectivity Group (www.ADC.com) says

Kabel-X machinery for pumping lubricant and pulling old copper fit into small enclosures. This is for pumping the lube.

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the biggest problem customers ask him to solve is “dark, wet, cramped spaces.” He adds, “It’s easy to build networks outside; it’s hard to deal with existing buildings. Sometimes there’s abandoned infrastructure in them. You don’t know if it’s [needed and] working. The huge challenge when you’re trying to reduce opex, and 25 percent of the access lines are going to MDUs, is how to serve them with broadband, and how to build it efficiently. “Part of the proof that it’s worth the trip is that it defends voice revenues and adds incremental revenue streams. Our innovation is pointed toward reducing opex, and increasing the ease of use for craft. We look at the whole system rather than the components. “Say you’ve got 140 units on 12 floors, with wall outlets, horizontal and vertical distribution, then the basement where the entrance is, and you want to do a fast install. We’re making smallform-factor connectors for 40 percent space savings. That’s important because when you’re going through granite or marble it makes it a lot easier. [You don’t have to drill as big a hole.] Concrete is easy; hard materials are hard. “We preload bobbins with a length of fiber. We have an applications scien-

| BROADBAND PROPERTIES | www.broadbandproper ties.com | November 2008

Nashville conference tist doing time-and-motion studies so we can demonstrate savings. When we make cabinets for the basement, we give them a low profile and swing frames so they fit in easily. How much variation [in the products] is necessary in order to be able to use them anywhere? There’s cultural and geographic diversity in buildings: one kind of building in Asia, another kind in South America. The regional tailoring of our products is 20 to 30 percent.” Also on the inside plant front are cheaper and more capable media gateways and set-top boxes (see our coverage of home networking in this section). ITU and IEEE are both working on interoperability standards. The ITU is more ambitious – a GPON interface that would allow devices using almost any protocol to talk to each other and to the carrier network. This G.hn may have its first published drafts by the end of this year, with product shipped by 2010. Result: Vastly lower deployment costs. William (Bill) Simmelink – President, North American Operations at Coppergate (www.copper-gate.com) – says IPTV is picking up steam. Coppergate brings IP to the TV over coax or phone lines, and makes chips for settop boxes and routers. Direct customers include Motorola, Cisco, and D-Link. AT&T is the biggest user, deploying Coppergate HPNA, which gets 200 Mbps actual throughput. Simmelink noted that providers are moving to features like whole-home DVR, which generates a lot of traffic and needs highquality transmission. Coppergate is also doing Ethernet over powerline. It acquired a PLC product from Conexant, but hasn’t released the first production version yet. The company’s goal is to be able to use any wire in the house. Coppergate has shipped about 7 million chips. Installation rates are rising for AT&T and other customers, and it has sales to other countries too. The new iNID (intelligent NID) architecture will take the routing logic to the NID. It puts a coax and phone feed into the house, already IP-enabled.

Cable from Superior Essex combines copper and fiber in one sheath – an increasingly common solution to the perceived need to offer consumers maximum flexibility in choice of carrier. You’ll be able to plug an HPNA device into any phone jack. This will give the service provider more control in terms of maintenance and diagnostics, and it adds bandwidth. It sends the video feed over coax and the data and voice streams over phone wires. The first devices have already appeared on the market, and are bringing home networks to the forefront. Simmelink says wireless is inadequate for TV – it’s not predictable or consistent enough, and service providers say it’s not there yet. Service providers are offering not just connections but entertainment; home networking needs to be robust enough to support that. The Motorola team – Dr. George H. Simmons, corporate VP and general manager, Motorola Access Network Solutions, Home and Networks Mobility, and Floyd Wagoner, marketing director, Access Networks Solutions – is excited about RFOG. “We’ve observed that RFOG lets cable providers meet requirements for fiber – some developers are saying fiber only,” says Simmons. “RFOG doesn’t give them additional bandwidth, but in the future they will be able to take advantage of the bandwidth. Once the RFOG is there, they can add an ONT and support additional wavelengths. If they have to lay any cable, it makes the most sense to use fiber. “RFOG is a bridging technology. It

lets them put fiber in the ground, and it’s a long-term path to when they’re ready to go to GPON or whatever. There are fewer actives in the field, and in some business cases it works to produce opex savings. There’s still operational continuity.” Motorola gets to keep the cable companies as customers as they evolve and transition. They say that some cable companies are going straight to GPON if they have very old cable plant or if they need more upstream bandwidth, especially for commercial customers demanding higher and symmetrical bandwidth. IP over DOCSIS will be a challenge for the cable companies, they said. “Eventually they’ll have to address this. They have to balance what they told the investment community with what they really need,” says Wagoner. Motorola (www.motorola.com) is partnering with Ocean Broadband to do EPON in Asia. Interoperability is easier with GPON than with EPON. Juan Vela, Director of Solutions Marketing and Strategy  at Occam (www.occamnetworks.com), says, “Topology and technology are two different issues – they’re independent of each other. We try to help customers define the topology they need first, then think about technology. We have six new Canadian customers, all doing FTTH – some P2P, some GPON. Some are building 10GigE metro rings.

November 2008 | www.broadbandproper ties.com | BROADBAND PROPERTIES |

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Nashville conference “On-demand content is growing – you have to factor this into the network design or you will have bottlenecks. We’re advocating a 10G metro ring (layer 2 edge) so as not to exhaust capacity. It’s better than OC-48 uplinks. You can use it for inter-central-office traffic. “Customers are trying to converge their residential and commercial networks, and put everything over IP. How to make it efficient? Use a single platform, with one wavelength for commercial, one for residential. “For smaller carriers, having one Ethernet-based platform is best. Carrier Ethernet is gaining traction. We have gained certification from the Metro Ethernet Forum for our 10G and 1G blades. The same boxes can be used for residential networks. We’re looking for mass-market acceptance. Looking at Europe, Latin America – but there’s more demand for DSL in Latin America. “We still think P2P is good for the long term, but GPON has a good business case now. It may fit the existing topology better. We’re getting customers upgrading from BPON or even from our competitors’ GPON. We can leverage the infrastructure that’s already there. Our blades have Ethernet cores – they’re the only nonblocking blades on the market. “Telcos facing a competitive challenge from MSOs are using fiber to retain customers. Fiber is the only technology that lets them compete and win over DOCSIS 3.0. A service provider can use technology as a means of differentiating, and augment some of the revenues lost on voice. “We’re seeing the beginnings of applications beyond the triple play: gaming services, home security, tech support. There’s product development going on, a more focused effort on developing revenues. “We’re active in FSAN, and involved in the next generation of FTTH, which is still two to three years out [to standards], four to five years till products. GPON can last till then. I think the next generation is more likely to be WDM – if you’re going to change, you might as well do something big. For now, I would use active Ethernet, with dedicated fiber.” BBP

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Emerson’s new NetSpan compact FDH series is a good example of MDUaware cabinets. The hubs can be used alone or with a separate spliceenclosure. The series includes indoor, outdoor, pad-, wall- and polemounted versions, and is available in 72, 96 and 144-port options.

Several distributors and dealers were showing full-featured OTDRs from Chinese manufacturers. Prices were closer to $5,000 than the $12,000 to $20,000 seen up until now. This makes the devices affordable to a new level of technician and makes it easier for property owners to certify a fiber network before tenants even move in.

| BROADBAND PROPERTIES | www.broadbandproper ties.com | November 2008

New cleaning tools for fiber, using disposable ribbonborne cleaning surfaces, sell for $40 to $70. These units are from Seikoh Giken and Senko.

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Small-diameter fibers can be used for more than going around tight corners. This 72-fiber cable from Sterlite is surprisingly compact.

AFL Telecommunications demonstrates bend-insen­ sitive jumpers for easy fiber management, particularly in tight spaces.

Charles Industries’ hubs and pedestals are technicianfriendly. Note the configuration of the posts, making it almost impossible to route a jumper the wrong way.

Allied Telesis featured its iMG Intelligent Multiservice Gateways with advanced switching, routing and WDM options (see more details in News this month).

November 2008 | www.broadbandproper ties.com | BROADBAND PROPERTIES |

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Nashville conference

JL’s fusion splicer, another Chinese import with a great price.

Pannaway’s blade box becomes a slick multimedia aggregation node. Enablence has purchased Pannaway.

At the OFS and Prysmian booths, simply winding fiber around a dowel or pen to prove bend performance or resistance to staple-gun abuse was not enough.

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| BROADBAND PROPERTIES | www.broadbandproper ties.com | November 2008