Fiber and wavelength open access in WDM and TWDM passive optical networks

There has been a large global effort to innovate and design optical access technologies that can accommodate the requirements emerging from a colossal increase in data rates. Currently TWDM-PONs and WDM-PONs have been foreseen as the main candidates for next-generation access systems. Due to current business modeling trends and possible regulatory obligations, these networks should also support open access, which refers to the sharing of a network infrastructure among different network entities in a non-discriminatory way. By sharing the (bottleneck) infrastructure facility, open access reduces the entry barrier for a network entity. This opens doors for a multi-provider scenario, which leads to competition among network players and can significantly reduce the price of services. Opening up the network, however, entails new architectures. In this article we propose novel architectures to support open access at the fiber and wavelength level for WDM-PON and TWDM-PON. These architectures differ significantly in terms of their cost (capital and operational expenditures). We compare the proposed architectures with regard to their cost and analyze the impact of adoption levels (percentage of users subscribed) and customer churn rate (how often the customers change network provider) on the cost of the architectures.