By Fernando X. Villarruel, Geoff Eaton & Marco Naveda, Ciena Corporation
By now the convergence of service signals over one digital MSO network needs no further motivation. Over the last some years there have been resources to describe the financial and engineering benefits of this transition.
In this paper we turn to the mechanism for creating the right form of infrastructure to make convergence an implementable reality. According to there are three requirements to make convergence successful: powering, backhaul and site availability. We find this a good generalization where power refers to the active power availability in the MSO outside plant, and site availability implies the fiber, coax, and pole access real estate to work with. In this paper we focus particularly on the backhaul section for successful convergence, which includes the connectivity of hubs and customer endpoints with the recent differentiator of digital fiber.