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Have fibre, will automate

About 50 years ago the first automatic telephone exchanges were installed in major centres around South Africa. But in those days, for most people around the country, to have a phone line was still a somewhat unreliable luxury for which you paid in pounds, while the first television station only started operating in South Africa 30 years ago. Compared with today, crime in those days was almost non-existent. As time went on, we stopped using pounds, the telecommunications industry grew, levels of crime rose and with it, around the early '90s, the residential gated estate was conceived.

Access to the Internet has grown at a rapid pace over the past decade, with around 10% of the population having access to the Internet by the beginning of 2006. The launch of broadband services revitalised growth in the industry to pre-2000 rates. Today's digital lifestyles in gated estates demand access to broadband Internet, high levels of security and lower cost for telecommunications services. This represents a unique opportunity for service providers: to provide voice, video, data, security and video-on-demand services, also known as 'Triple play' to end customers. In this new communications environment, access is key.

Until now, telephone and DSL connections were routed to end users' premises using copper cable with limited bandwidth and reliability. Security video surveillance and intercom services were also routed using copper cable or legacy point-to-point links. Video broadcast services were utilising the radio frequency spectrum to transmit one-way signals to end-users' premises with very little or no interactivity. Although broadband wireless is being deployed in major centres, coverage is still problematic and with limited licensed frequency spectrum, which is a shared medium, it has its limitations. In addition, all of these diverse technologies each add cost to the end-user in terms of maintenance, different support staff and different approaches to doing business.

Enter GE-PON FTTH

A new technology being deployed worldwide at a rapid pace offers the ultimate solution for reliable convergence of services and removing the last-mile bandwidth bottleneck: GE-PON FTTH or Gigabit Ethernet Passive Optic Network Fibre To The Home.

Based on Ethernet technology, the fastest growing network technology of the past two decades, this technology uses cost-efficient point-to-multipoint fibre-optic cables in a totally passive tree-like structure to transmit and receive signals over any distance literally at the speed of light. It has almost unlimited bandwidth to combine security, telecommunications, Internet and video services onto one technology platform and to expand these services to the bandwidth requirements of today and tomorrow. This technology is the next step in the evolution of last-mile networks. It is changing the way that telephone, Internet, security and television networks in the US, Europe, Asia and now Africa operate, and its benefits and the new opportunities it creates far outweigh the cost of installing such a system in a gated community.

GE-PON FTTH technology enables the delivery of the following Triple-play services over a single fibre-optic core no thicker than a human hair:

* Security - IP cameras, recording servers, access control devices.

* Telecommunication - Telephone (POTS), VoIP, Fax, IP phone, Intercom.

* Data - Gigabit broadband data (Internet), e-mail, VLAN services (virtual LAN services), online gaming.

* Video - Video on demand (VOD), IP broadcasting, terrestrial and satellite RF signals, video conferencing.

Pretoria-based BEE company Letlhaka Technologies successfully started implementing Alloptic FTTH (home) and FTTB (business) GE-PON equipment in the local market about a year ago, and found the equipment to perform with unprecedented reliability and cost-efficiency. It found the technology to be orders of magnitude faster than existing ADSL, wireless or satellite connections and to be virtually limitless when it comes to future expansion. It simplifies the deployment and cost of security networks and enables new services such as video-on-demand and IP-TV to be implemented. Alloptic's GE-PON, based on open IEEE TCP/IP standards, is also fully compatible with third-party Ethernet and standards-based GE-PON products produced worldwide. The technology is ideal for deployment in gated business and residential communities to enable private security, telecommunication and entertainment networks of today and the future. In addition to being fast, it also cuts maintenance cost and downtime to virtually nothing because fibre-optic cable is non-conductive and immune to lightning or electrical interference and also less prone to theft.

Alloptic is the industry leader when it comes to FTTH or FTTB technology with its GE-PON system successfully deployed to over 1 million homes in 23 different countries. In Africa, Alloptic successfully deployed a GE-PON system in Rwanda over two years ago and along with its African partner, Letlhaka Technologies, has so far with great success also implemented FTTB systems in South Africa and Mozambique. By the time this article is published Alloptic and Letlhaka Technologies will also have deployed the first operational residential FTTH systems in South Africa.

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