FTTU: MSO perspective

Summary form only given. The cable industry has been deploying fiber optic cable for over 25 years, running triple play bundled service for most of those years. The industry has also been deploying fiber-to-the-premises to commercial customers for many years. And, with respct to residential fiber, MSOs have taken a lead role in defining next generation EPON standards as part of the IEEE 803.xyz activities and developed SCTE 174, also known as the standard defining RF over Glass (RFoG). Lastly, of course, the industry is introducing the most advanced residential copper technology in the form of DOCSIS 3.1 over its massively deployed Hybrid Fiber-Coax infrastructure. What has been behind each of these initiatives is that Internet traffic continues to grow exponentially, year on year. It has been driven by video over the last several years (i.e. Netflix, Hulu, etc) and it is anticipated that IoT applications will be what continues to drive this growth trend going forward. In addition to the requirements for new capacity, MSOs have to also consider competitive market speeds, as non-traditional providers attempt to penetrate the space with promises of higher and higher speeds. To meet this demand, multiple technology options are becoming available to support both residential and Commercial customers. Among these are the aforementioned DOCSIS 3.1, Point-to-Point Fiber solutions (Ethernet), Point-to-Multipoint Fiber solutions (xPON), optical advances in modulation and WDM, and even wideband wireless technologies. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, and the use of multiple technologies allows MSOs to optimize services to customers while keeping the architecture ahead of the capacity and speeds demands projected.