PON is the cure for last-mile bandwidth bottlenecks

Two industry insiders debate the benefits of passive optical networking vs. Active Ethernet.

Passive optical networking, specifically Gigabit PON, already is proving to be the cure for last-mile bandwidth bottlenecks. Service providers are in a race to deliver high-speed, triple-play services through fiber-to-the-premises architectures. In fact, most major telecom providers have committed to FTTP - and their technology of choice for the access portion of the network is PON.

Competing technologies, such as Active Ethernet, simply don't fit the access world. A point-to-point architecture isn't the most cost-effective, interoperable, scalable and manageable way to get multiple services to a large number of geographically diverse users.

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Griffin is executive vice president of Optical Solutions, a vendor of FTTP technologies. He can be reached at jgriffin@opticalsolutions.com.

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