The Power of Loop Reduction

OVERVIEW

Most telecom service providers consider Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) to be the ultimate solution for competing with their Cable TV rivals. FTTH offers virtually unlimited bandwidth and is very affordable in new greenfield installations. But in the vast majority of installations, where twisted pair copper is still being used, it is too expensive to overlay the existing copper network with an end-to-end Passive Optical Network (PON) and FTTH. The shared portion of the PON is not the culprit; instead, it is the cost of replacing the ‘last mile’ connections to the individual customers that prohibits the universal deployment of FTTH.

While Line Power is affordable and can be implemented quickly, it is not as prevalent and therefore not as well under-stood as Local Power methods. Line Power is a cross-over technology involving both Inside Plant and Outside Plant organizations. Typical concerns about Line Power include safety, the suitability of cables for delivering Line Power service, planning & engineering, and the nuances of connecting and commissioning a line-powered network. Regardless of the benefits of Line Power, these concerns must be addressed in order for it to gain universal acceptance as a solution for powering broadband/DSLAM networks.

As the foremost proponent of Line Power, Alpha - an EnerSys company has created an 8-part series on how to plan and engineer a line-powered DSLAM network. Using our experience with service provider CAF projects, we have created a compre-hensive guide to aid in understanding how to use Line Power in a Loop Reduction program. In this white paper series, the underlying assumption is that DSL equipment will be placed closer to the customers, fed by either fiber or copper cables, and powered from a centralized location using copper cable pairs to deliver the Line Power.