An Innovative Approach to Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH)

In the last mile of optical access network, FTTX such as fiber-to-the-cabinet, curb, building, home and node construction cost per subscriber has always been a concern for the network operators. In order to cost down the fiber and transceiver deployment, passive optical network (PON) are developed to replace active point-to-point (P2P). Also the splitter placement problems are issued that make efforts to reduce fiber and splitters deployment cost. Cost down the optical components in PONs is one of the successful elements for building the business of fiber-to-the-home (FTTH). For an example of insertion loss (IL), a traditional 1x12 splitter module which is cascaded by one piece of 1x2 (67%:33% power ratio, 2.6dB:6.2dB IL) and 10 pieces of 1x2 (50%:50% power ratio, 3.7dB IL) splitters, the IL of module is 2.6+3.7x3=13.7dB. An economical and innovative 1x12 splitter module presented in this paper could be cascaded just by one piece of 1x3 (IL: 5.4 dB) and 3 pieces of 1x4 (IL: 7.2dB), the IL of module will be 5.4+7.2=12.6dB, 1.1dB less than the former. In the case of 1x36, an innovative one is cascaded by 4 pieces of 1x3 and 9 pieces of 1x4 splitters (IL: 18dB) to replace the traditional one which is cascaded by 35 pieces of 1x2 splitters (IL: 19.9dB). Another case of 2x24, an innovative one is cascaded by 1 piece of 2x2, 2 pieces of 1x3 and 6 pieces of 1x4 splitters (IL: 16.3dB) to replace the traditional one which is cascaded by 1 pieces of 2x2 and 22 piece of 1x2 splitters (IL: 17.4dB). Finally, bundle with less IL, the economical multi-output splitter module can be successfully built up by this novel fiber coupler manufacturing apparatus and method.