GPON and EP2P: A techno-economic study

New services like Video on demand/Internet Protocol Television, Voice over IP and high speed Internet access demand very high bandwidth to provide Triple Play services to the customers. The ADSL/ADLS2+ and the VDSL/VDSL2 copperwire technologies deteriorate quickly with the distance and will be soon obsolete for supporting the ultra-high bandwidth requirements of the next future. One suitable long term solution for such a high bandwidth demand is employing optical fibers to customers premises (FTTH). In particular, two optical distribution network architectures, GPON (gigabit passive optical network) and EP2P (Ethernet point-to-point), are competing for the network access segment. This paper surveys the two technologies and evaluates them from a quantitative techno-economic point of view, trying to identify which market scenarios are best served by EP2P and which are best served by GPON architectures for supporting the requirement of Triple Play applications.