Fiber to the home/fiber to the premises: what, where, and when?

After conquering the core and metropolitan networks, fiber is now penetrating into the access domain. Its low loss and huge bandwidth enable the delivery of any current and foreseeable set of broadband services, and also make it a nice match to the wireless link to the end user. Cost effectiveness is a key issue, and will be decisive for the network topology choices. Point-to-point may be the most cost-effective for short-reach access, whereas point-to-multipoint may be the most interesting at medium- to long-reach access, or when line terminations in the local exchange become a key issue. A number of optical techniques being deployed for shared-fiber multiple access are discussed, based on time slot multiplexing, frequency slot multiplexing, code division multiplexing, and wavelength multiplexing, including their application in fiber to the home/fiber to the premises (FTTH/FTTP) networks for fast data transfer (asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) or Ethernet based) and for broadband service distribution (such as CATV). In the research laboratories, techniques aiming at next-generation optical access are being studied, such as wavelength routing for flexible capacity allocation and easily adaptable hosting of services and service providers, and radio-over-fiber techniques creating a powerful symbiosis of the fiber world and the wireless world by enabling centralized radio signal processing.