Designing for Growth

Growth in neighborhoods and cities means that there is a lot of stress on the existing utilities. As you might expect, the over-taxed utilities are showing the strain. Our telecom networks are not immune from growth problems. The Charter cable network clearly has occasional problems. It’s not hard to imagine that there are neighborhoods where the cable network is overloaded due to growth. I also imagine that Charter's networks are a hodge-podge of different neighborhoods built over time – it is not one big ubiquitous network but rather a patchwork of smaller networks built in different decades that are all grafted together. That means different generations of coaxial cable, different sizes of cable nodes, and different schemes and designs of taps and amplifiers. Passive optical networks (PON) are the best at handling growth. A good analogy for thinking of a PON network is to envision one of the many board games that are based on hexagons. PON technology can handle growth by adding new hexagons as long as the broadband provider can get enough bandwidth to feed the new neighborhood. A PON network can theoretically handle nearly unlimited growth. If an existing hexagon adds a lot of new homes, it’s just as easy to add a new PON core optical line terminal (OLT). However, not all fiber networks are alike. I know some providers that are building what I consider to be slim fiber networks, meaning a network with a minimum of extra fibers. The chances are that in most rural places this will be okay – but it means a lot of future investment in areas where growth shows up unexpectedly.