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PAVING THE WAY TO REAL BROADBAND ACCESS
ADSL technology was found to be ready for mass market deployment and thus transfer rates of 2 Mbit/s can soon become the standard for private users. This was tested in pilot projects in different European countries. The field trials showed that the necessary micro filter at the customer's premises is easy to install saving expensive technical support. Additionally, VDSL technology, providing even more bandwidth than ADSL, was tested in field trials at KPN (The Netherlands), France Telecom R&D (France) and Telecom Italia CSELT (Italy). Different service mixes were used in the field trials, and three different architecture concepts (FTTCab, FTTB and FTTH/O) were tested. The project team also improved the whole process of building and operating a broadband access network. They developed a specification for a universal access network planning tool. At present access networks are planned differently, depending on the medium (fibre, copper, radio) and technology used, plus the services provided. Establishing a unified planning process is going to save billions of € across Europe. Modest estimates by experts like EURESCOM supervisor Adam Kapovits on the potential cost-saving run between 10 and 20 billion €. Another cost-saving innovation is the specification and design of a unified street cabinet that can house the equipment necessary for the upgrade of the outside plant to deliver broadband services. Prototypes of a EURESCOM broadband cabinet have been successfully tested. Another improvement concerns the powering of the cabinets. Nowadays local powering is used in most cases. Recent developments in telecommunications lead to a dramatic decrease of the power demand in the exchanges. The idea is to use the surplus power available in the exchanges for the remote powering of active equipment in the outside plant. Operators would benefit in saving costs and reaching a higher degree of independence from power companies. The technical feasibility of this solution was successfully tested. A regulatory survey revealed that in most European countries this solution is legally possible, with some constraints. During their research the project team detected a problem: the lack of suitable monitoring equipment for the access networks. Presently, available monitoring equipment of fiber optic lines are designed to be used in the core network and are not really suitable for the application in the access network because of the different, special requirements. There is also no equipment available to monitor live copper lines. Network monitoring in the access would help planning maintenance works and improve customer perception of the service quality, which is considered a major differentiating factor in a liberalised telecommunications market. Furthermore, EURESCOM's project has found out that operators might be compelled by the regulator to provide monitoring, even if monitoring can not be justified on a purely cost basis. In the near future the traditional network concept differentiating between core and access networks could become obsolete. With the penetration of the WDM technology into the metro and access, a more unified network is emerging, in which the same technology is used at the physical layer throughout the whole network, end-to-end. Considering the convergence and unification of networks in the higher layers created by the emergence and dominance of Internet Protocol, and the end-to-end QoS support demanded by customers in a fully liberalised market, we are witnessing a true paradigm shift in networking. To prepare for this change, potential application areas and possible evolution scenarios for WDM in the access network were identified by the EURESCOM team.
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