Part II: WIRELINE TECHNOLOGIES
7
PAVING THE ROAD TO Gbit/s BROADBAND ACCESS WITH COPPER
7.1 INTRODUCTION
Ubiquitous low-cost broadband access is a key enabler of quality of life and modern economy. The demand on end-user data rates keeps increasing, which in turn fuels the development and deployment of new systems. Fixed broadband access technology is evolving from exclusively copper-based solutions to hybrid fiber/copper architectures. A recent analysis of this evolutionary process has revealed that there is a gap—a missing, not foreseen system generation [1]. This chapter is devoted to this expected next step in the evolution of broadband systems, here named the 4th-Generation Broadband concept. It identifies a technical, infrastructural, and economical niche and describes how the fiber access network is extended and forked to feed a last and ultimate generation of DSL systems, shown to have gigabit potential.
Our classification of broadband systems into “generations” contains only broadband systems operating on the twisted copper pairs of the public telephony network and optical fiber—that is, DSL systems and fiber access systems. The future, as well as the present, will certainly see also other technologies such as coaxial cable access systems (using cable TV infrastructure) or fixed wireless access systems, but we leave these outside the scope of this presentation. ...
