Title :
Fibre-to-the-Hut: Research into tailored FTTH solutions for Africa
Author :
Gamatham, Romeo ; Rotich, Enoch ; Leitch, Andrew ; Gibbon, Timothy
Author_Institution :
Phys. Dept., Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Univ., Port Elizabeth, South Africa
Abstract :
Next-generation FTTH technology is aggressively being developed and deployed in Europe, Asia and in the USA. Countries like Japan with high per-capita income and high-density residential complexes remain at the forefront of FTTH and WDM-PON developments. The majority of African countries face unique socio-economic challenges, along with sprawling population distributions. As such, there is a need to develop network technologies, network architectures and business models applicable to the African case. In this presentation we discuss these issues and present potential solutions. We further show our experimental results of how low-cost Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers (VCSELs) are suited to long-reach 4.25 Gbps access networks in the African context. This work is part of a new and exciting project “Fibre-to-the-Hut: Researching Novel FTTH Solutions for Africa”, currently being launched by the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University.
Keywords :
optical fibre subscriber loops; passive optical networks; wavelength division multiplexing; African countries; Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University; VCSEL; WDM-PON developments; bit rate 4.25 Gbit/s; fibre-to-the-hut; next-generation FTTH technology; novel FTTH solutions; sprawling population distributions; vertical cavity surface emitting lasers; Dispersion; Optical fiber subscriber loops; Optical fibers; Passive optical networks; Vertical cavity surface emitting lasers; Wavelength division multiplexing; Fibre to the home (FTTH); Fibre-to-the-Hut (FTTHut); optical line terminal (ONT); optical network unit (ONU); passive optical network (PON); vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL);
Conference_Titel :
AFRICON, 2013
Conference_Location :
Pointe-Aux-Piments
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4673-5940-5
DOI :
10.1109/AFRCON.2013.6757618