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Defyng Big Carriers With Municipal Fiber – Utopia’s active optical network leads to significant cost savings

The decision by a municipality to build its own fiber network can represent a direct challenge to large carriers. As in the controversy over municipal Wi-Fi, commercial service providers have loudly condemned municipal fiber projects as examples of government competing unfairly with the private sector. Municipalities have retorted that they wouldn’t have had to start their projects if commercial providers had served them better.

But choosing a particular optical technology can mean confronting a more indirect form of big-carrier influence: the conventional technological wisdom. Take Utopia, the controversial project by 14 Utah cities to connect all 170,000 homes and businesses within their territories with fiber to the premises. DynamicCity, the company that designed and is implementing the network for Utopia (which stands for Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Age), decided early on to buck the trend towards passive optical networks. The main force driving that trend was RBOCs’ plans to bring the triple play to every home through fiber to the premises.

Utopia opted for an active optical network. That meant putting some of the network’s electronics in cabinets a kilometer or two from the end user, and using it rather than passive optical amplifiers to divvy up incoming fiber bandwidth and distribute it over lower-bandwidth fiber links to individual customer premises. The savings in $40-a-shot splitters more than made up for the more expensive powered and air-conditioned cabinets it required, according to Jeff Fishburn, DynamicCity CTO. And because the equipment in the cabinet can handle as many as 100 customer fiber links, as opposed to 32 per passive splitter, it can actually cut the amount of higher-bandwidth fiber links the network needs, he claims.

By: Robert Poe
America’s Network

Full Story: http://www.americasnetwork.com/americasnetwork/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=180264

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