Meeting the Traffic Requirements of Residential Users in the Next Decade with Current FTTH Standards: How Much? How Long?

Traffic demand in access networks has grown in recent years, and service providers need to upgrade their infrastructure to the latest access standards. While fiber has become the preferred technology of choice in access networks, there are many fibre access technologies available in the market. This poses challenging questions to operators that are not always easy to answer: How to upgrade? What technology and for how long wil it cope with the demands? In this article we model the traffic forecast in access networks for the next decade and analyze possible upgrade scenarios of fibre access networks, concluding which of the NG-PON flavors could better fit the demand.