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With the emergence of high-bandwidth services such as video services, it becomes imperative to increase the bandwidth to develop the next generation broadband networks.
Trend of Broadband Network
Currently, the bandwidth bearer capacity of a broadband network stays at 512K - 2M and the broadband services are basically confined to high-speed Internet access. It is estimated that a bandwidth of at least 10M is needed, which is the basic requirement for supporting services such as stream video, video conferencing, video phone and a high-speed Internet access. Considering the diversity of value-added services in the future, the demand for bandwidth increase will be infinite. As bandwidths and services are becoming increasingly diverse, personalized solutions would be characterized by a combination of multiple services and customer-oriented service innovations, so as to satisfy the needs for individualism, differentiation, mobility, self-service and multimedia services.
In the long run, FTTH (Fiber To The Home technology) will be the direction of broadband development. Considering important factors such as cost, service request, technology and competition, the FTTH evolution will span over a long time. As a consequence, XDSL will most likely remain the mainstream of the broadband access technology, for at least 5 years; with a focus on the ADSL2/2+ and supplementation by new technologies such as the VDSL/2 and UDSL, FTTH would be firstly provided to business users. At the same time, wireless access is another trend. With widespread non-PC intelligent terminals in home networks, in-house wireless cabling is becoming increasingly popular. WLAN thus becomes a major choice. For the last-mile access, WiMax, which is likely to become a strong competitor for the twisted pair, will effectively help startup carriers to expand network coverage.
- Next Generation Broadband Access Network
The next generation broadband network requires that the user's bandwidth be above 10Mbps, whereas XDSL is still the major access technology. Traditionally, fixed-network carriers' core competitiveness lies in providing high bandwidth based on twisted pairs.
Judging from the ADSL2+ technology, which attracts wide attention in the industry, the broadband access nodes should be close enough to the users and the copper-wire coverage should be within 1Km to address the requirement for 10Mbps bandwidth. The need to deploy a large number of nodes in the users' premises will result in space exhaustion in the end office. Moreover, a great increase in the number of access nodes will give rise to a new challenge concerning network maintenance and management. Therefore, broadband access devices need a large-scale optimization of capacity, performance, networking, management and maintenance. And new devices may be needed to replace old ones.
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