
4.1.1 Historical Background
The recent tremendous growth in IP traffic has accentuated the aggravating
lag of access network capacity, rendering the ‘‘last mile’’ the bottleneck between
local area and backbone networks. It is currently believed that copper-based
access networks (cable modem and many kinds of digital subscriber lines or
DSLs) do not provide either the minimum bandwidth or the required transmis-
sion distance for delivering future services of voice, data, and video programs
such as IPTV and HDTV. To resolve this problem, PONs are identified as a
promising, cost-effective, and future-safe access solution [1]. Full-service access
PON networks ...