Fiber deep deployment for MSOs

Fiber deep, along with other changes happening in the MSO access space, such as distributed access architecture (DAA) and remote PHY, will significantly change the technology landscape. Technicians, that are trained on traditional coax CMTS architectures will need to learn how to build, test and operate fiber rich, Ethernet deep architectures.

Fiber comes with its own set of challenges, especially as bandwidth limits get pushed higher to address broadband services. Impairments—such as damaged or dirty fiber connectors, cable macrobends, bad splices, and dispersion issues that become more prevalent for signals greater than 10 Gbit/s on fibers longer than 10 km—will impact network performance if not accounted for and dealt with. Additionally, fiber deep networks will start to leverage CWDM and DWDM technologies to make more effective use of the fiber infrastructure—especially as emerging services such as IoT, 5G and over-the-top streaming broadband become more common.

Having the right tools and solutions to address these issues up front will be critical to successful fiber deep transformations.