Abstract

With the accelerating deployment of optical fibers in telephone access networks comes a need for strategies for upgrading these networks from handling telephones only to providing broad-band services. Successful strategies must meet both technical and financial goals¹. Fortunately, the attainment of these goals has been aided by progress in digital compression technology, which greatly reduces the bandwidth required for broadband services². In this paper we demonstrate a broadband passive optical network³ (PON) serving 16 optical network units (ONUs) in a modification of a system described previously⁴. The PON provides 39 Mbit/s outbound and 3 Mbit/s return for each ONU. These bit rates are sufficient to allow each O N U to receive, for example, several compressed digital video channels, each requiring 4-6 Mbids, and to send multiple video teleconferencing calls at 384 kbit/s apiece. The choice of components and architecture is intended to demonstrate a cost-effective solution to the broadband upgrade problem.

© 1994 Optical Society of America