By Dr. M. Farooque Mesiya, American Lightwave Systems, Inc.
A number of architectures have been proposed to provide VSB/AM modulated video, digital compressed QAM video and telephony services over a hybrid optical/coax network. The majority of these architectures employ an RF carrier for each individual POTS circuit, which is dynamically allocated to serve only active POTS li!les. The disadvantages of this approach include the inherent blocking factor that must be accounted for and the difficulty in migrating from single POTS to a rich menu of enhanced telephony and data services.
The Passive Optical Network Architecture (PON) has the advantage of being able to allocate bandwidth dynamically to any customer on demand. Additionally, as overall network capacity demands grow, the capacity of the network can be expanded incrementally to match increased demand.
A Passive Optical/Coax Hybrid Network (POCN) can be designed which provides video as well as enhanced telephony and data services, while providing all of the economies associated with an optical/coax cable architecture. The optimum economic serving areas for telephone and video based services are remarkably similar.
This paper describes a POCN network, and the economics for providing both CATV and POTS based service.