PON Passive Optical Network Technology Enters a Phase of Large-scale Development

Sustained rapid economic growth and rising income levels have driven a sharp surge in the number of domestic Internet users. According to statistics from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, from 2004 to 2008, China's broadband users increased from 23.85 million to 83.43 million, a cumulative growth of as much as 249.81%, creating a huge demand for bandwidth in the market. The explosive growth of the optical broadband market in China is just beginning, and it is expected that the next 3 to 5 years will be a period of rapid growth. Therefore, experts have noted that by the end of 2008, China had 640 million mobile phone users and 340 million fixed-line users, while broadband users numbered only 80 million. From the perspectives of absolute value and growth rate, China's broadband market has enormous growth potential, with new users expected to reach 20 million per year in the coming years.

Moreover, with the development of various value-added services based on the Internet, more multimedia applications will be loaded onto communication networks in the future. As users spend more time using communication services, network bandwidth has become a new source of pressure on communication networks. Traditional fixed-line operators previously relied mainly on copper cable access, using DSL to provide broadband access to users. However, the bandwidth that DSL can provide is very limited and cannot meet the bandwidth requirements of subsequent services. Therefore, operators such as China Telecom and China Unicom are actively promoting "fiber-to-the-x, copper retirement" (optical fiber substitution for copper), using fiber access to provide users with a high-bandwidth, full-service access platform.

According to industry experts, the fiber access we commonly use today can be divided into two modes from a network architecture perspective: P2P (point-to-point) and P2MP (point-to-multipoint). The P2P mode, dominated by the traditional "MC + LAN" model, has insurmountable drawbacks such as occupying a large amount of fiber cable resources and poor service provisioning capability. Therefore, operators have shifted their focus to the P2MP mode, which is the PON (Passive Optical Network) mode. Since its emergence, PON has undergone years of development, forming a series of technologies including APON, EPON, GPON, and WDMPON. However, judging from the current network construction situation in China, as technologies of the same generation, EPON has relatively obvious advantages in three aspects: large-scale commercial deployment, service bearing, and development planning, making it the mainstream technology in China's current broadband network construction. From the recent bidding projects of China Unicom and China Telecom, it is not difficult to see that mainstream domestic operators have already defined their FTTx network construction approach based on EPON technology.

Among the three major domestic telecommunications operators, China Telecom is the core promoter of FTTx and owns the largest FTTx network in China. Its network construction is centered on EPON technology, with FTTB as the primary construction mode, and the current network construction volume is nearly 4 million FTTB user ports. China Telecom's future construction plan for the FTTx network is to achieve the goal of controlling copper cable length within 500m in urban areas within 3 to 5 years, with developed eastern cities and provincial capitals in central and western China striving to complete this within 3 years; the fiber penetration rate for urban commercial buildings will increase by 10% annually, striving to reach 85% on average nationwide by 2010; after fiber reaches administrative villages, the copper cable distance will be controlled within 2km, and the fiber penetration rate for rural administrative villages will increase by 10% annually, striving to reach 70% on average nationwide by 2010. After China Telecom's push into FTTx, China Unicom followed suit and launched the world's largest EPON centralized procurement project, totaling 11.3 million lines.