PON is much more flexible mainly due to the much lower signal loss per distance. There are ways to deploy that almost exactly mirror an HFC network - There are strand mounted OLTs, you can "tap" the signal in exactly the same fashion as HFC taps where you have one active coax or fiber and the tap values change as you go down the road to keep customer outputs correct. They even make plug and play taps that look almost like CATV taps.
I think it's more common to have your aggregation points serving larger areas with PON, mainly because you can and it's more economical that way. One large cabinet or hut can serve thousands of homes within a 10-15 mile radius without sacrificing anything. Using splitters out in the field (small splitter cabinets, or distributed in splice cases) keeps your PON feeder fiber count moderate so you can hit a huge area without getting into large cables,cases, and handholes. In our network, at first we deployed cabinets, but have moved to huts mainly for security, backup power, cooling, and technician convenience. It's a rural area so one hut might have two to four 72-288 fibers, but that's a lot of spare strands. Most of our main runs have at most about 30-40 active PON strands leaving the hut in a given direction. On Fri, Mar 15, 2024 at 7:59 PM Ken Hohhof <[email protected]> wrote: > > Since there are FTTH people here and I’m mostly ignorant of such things, > maybe someone can clear something up for me. > > > > I always assumed a PON based FTTH system had a topology kind of like HFC. I > expected fiber down the street with splitters, but fed by some sort of > neighborhood node in a cabinet with power and electronics, fed by active EPL > style fiber. Which could have redundant paths, rings, etc. so a fiber cut > wouldn’t take down a whole town or multiple towns, the backbone traffic would > reroute. > > > > I’ve been told this is not the case. And that instead, each PON could go > back over a strand to a headend several towns and many miles away, all > passive. > > > > Sorry for the poor description of my question, hopefully you can figure out > what I’m asking. > > -- > AF mailing list > [email protected] > http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
