Optical access

The trend toward optical fibre networks replacing, or at least partly substituting, copper local loop telecommunications infrastructure has been driven largely by developments in Asia.

In South Korea and Japan, such developments have been heavily supported by the countries' respective governments in a bid to attract greater ICT investment.

 

However, commercial constraints and regulatory restrictions have conspired to act as more of a deterrent in Western markets where operators have proven reluctant to discard their legacy networks, according to Elaine Chow, a telecommunications consultant for research firm Ovum.

Alcatel-Lucent's experience of working with fibre optic access networks dates back to the initial commercial availability of the technology almost 30 years ago.

The company recently set a world record for the transmission feed of 25.6 Tb/s of optical data over a single fibre strand - enough bandwidth to transmit data from more than 600 feature length DVDs per second - earlier this year.

This feat by far surpassed the previous transmission record of 14 Tb/s established in September 2006 by Nippon Telegram and Telephone. It also serves to underline how commercial availability continues to lag far behind technological capability.

"Optical networking is a critical enabler of the broadband IP revolution that we are seeing throughout the world today," asserts Romano Valussi, president of Alcatel-Lucent's Optics activities.

With such rapid technological advancements hinting at the massive potential of the technology long-term, the onus remains on network operators to make sufficient investment in the commercial deployment of fibre optic technology.

Given that the Middle East telco sector is still classified as a ‘developing market' by many industry analysts, how do regional operators stand to benefit from such technological advances?

"At present, maximum connectivity speeds for customers in the Middle East is 1-2Tb/s using the South East Asia, Middle East and Western Europe cable (SEAMEWE-4)," claims Mazen Hamadallah, Alcatel-Lucent general manager and country senior officer UAE, Kuwait, Qatar and Oman.

"This cable extends from South East Asia to Western Europe and is relayed through to terrestrial transport networks to areas such as the Middle East."

Hamadallah points out that the large scale deployment of fibre optics firstly requires transmission equipment (otherwise known as backhaul) to transport information between the network nodes.

"Secondly, what is required is an access network. Access technology is different from the transmission equipment as it has less capacity to transport data," he adds.

Although the cost of a fibre to the home (FTTH ) rollout will vary from country-to-country, Ovum's Chow estimates the cost to be in the vicinity of $1,500 per household in a given market.