Question: Which bandwidth will I need to my home in 10 years - 100Mbit/s, 1Gbit/s, 10Gbit/s or more? Answer: Yes!
I was at the FTTH Council Europe conference in Milan, Italy, last week. I participated at the NGA workshop and was asked what I think would be the residential bandwidth in 10 years. Others were asked as well and the answers ranged from 100Mbit/s to 10Gbit/s and more. And I thought: hey, everyone is right! You can’t predict it. And it’ll depend on people’s services consuming behavior. The only thing we can say is that history tells us that bandwidth will continue to increase. Every year.
Video will definitely continue to be the key driver for more bandwidth demand. I really enjoy watching HDTV programs on my home cinema equipment. You can’t beat a beamer, a screen and a serious sound projecting system. And I can easily imagine to upgrade to super high definition TV and even 3D in future. Verizon is predicting a bit rate of up to 800Mbit/s for 3D UHDTV in its FiOS network. Here we go, 1Gbit/s FTTH connection.
The FTTH Council Europe issued a business guide last year. An updated version was distributed at the conference last week. The purpose of the guide is to give guidance and recommendations to FTTH projects investors. One of the recommendations is to not only focus on residential services but to try to address business, carriers and public sector applications as well. This more broader approach will decrease the return of investment period. So if I look at home office applications in future data rates of up to 10Gbit/s could be required.
What does this mean for the future fiber infrastructure and technology? It needs to be flexible. Key requirements will be scalability, since you can’t predict bandwidth needs. Security will be needed in case of business applications. Clients must not have access to other clients’ signals. And it needs to be simple. Only simple architectures have the potential for low cost FTTH deployments. Point-to-point architectures are supporting these requirements. And in combination with WDM-PON fibers are saved in addition. This makes this technology the perfect answer to the 10-years bandwidth question.
Read more on this topic here:Introducing WDM into Next-Generation Access Networks