Evolving Optical Networks to Reduce Total Cost of Ownership

Summary form only given. Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) will enable a rich set of bandwidth hungry services to be provided to customers. These services will drive unprecedented increases in the total bandwidth carried over operator´s networks. The cost of providing the network capacity to deliver these services can easily exceed any revenue growth arising from customers using those services. This creates a major dilemma for operators and if not resolved could slow the progress of FTTP and very high bandwidth services. The solution to the problem, proposed by the authors, is to enable large reductions in the cost of bandwidth provision by radically changing the architecture of the end to end network such that capital build cost and the operational costs can be reduced in all three domains in the network; Access, Metro and Core. This paper describes this architecture which combines the access and metro network into one network, at the same time eliminating central offices, which are in turn interconnected at a relative few core edge nodes (Metro-nodes in BT´s 21cn architecture) by an optical circuit switched core network. Packet switching/routing only takes place at the Core edge nodes.