Long-Reach Passive Optical Networks and Access/Metro Integration

The physical layout of cables and nodes in many of today’s passive optical networks (s) still dates back to the early days of copper loop installations, with customer to exchange node distances limited to a few kilometers largely by the transmission distance of analogue telephony over the copper pairs. However, modern optical communication technologies can enable much longer transmission distances, and through the use of optical amplification can effectively integrate the access and metro portions of the network into a single all-optical communication system, which is commonly referred to as “Long-reach PON” () or “Amplified PON”. LR-PONs offer several advantages in terms of infrastructure sharing, network node consolidation and core network delayering.