Verizon buying Frontier

[harshness]

With the advent of symmetrical broadband speeds, I don't imagine they're using splitters like they used to. Back in the day, the TV broadcasts were multicast and today they are largely unicast.

 

[telstar_1]

Remember narrowcasting?

 

[Tom Speer]

What some of you folks are missing is that these PON splitters are using Wave Division Multiplexing (WDM). They are not splitting the bandwidth of the trunk fiber into separate homes. The light on the trunk fiber is carrying each home's bandwidth on different wavelengths of light (frequencies) the Optical splitter is a prism or more likely a diffraction grating to separate the wavelengths to physically different locations where it is coupled to different fibers going to each house. In the reverse direction the light from each home is combined back into separate wavelengths on the trunk fiber.

On my MetroNet provider (now marketed and billed by T-Mobile Fiber) there are PON splitters in flush mounted boxes in the utility ROW next to the street. I don't know if there are PON splitters further upstream in a tree structure. The system designers would have to design the system knowing how many different wavelengths of a given bandwidth they can support on a single fiber.

The drops to each house are each a single fiber as far I know,. Maybe there is a spare in the cable. Adding fibers to a cable does not significantly add to its installed cost, and most of the trunk cables I have been able to look at contain 144 individual fibers.