FTTH rollout brings high request on ODN

6/11/2010, China usually boasts herself as the fastest growing FTTx market. Both China Telecom and China Unicom are actively investing on FTTx rollout. The broadband bandwidth that Chinese residents can acquire is increasing from 2Mbps to 8Mbps, even to 20Mbps. But behind this FTTx passion, China still lacks two most important factors of FTTX, engineering support and real subscribers.

With the launch of the new triple play policy, the IPTV service will be sure to help telecom service providers get more FTTx subscribers. And on this week's Shanghai "Broadband China FTTH summit", we can find more traces on China's FTTx engineering support.

The key speaker of the summit, Mr. Zhang Jun, vice chief engineer of Shanghai Telecom, China Telecom's Shanghai Branch, explained Shanghai's City Optical Network plan which aims at at least 200K FTTH subscribers in year 2010. According to Mr. Zhang, they plan to invest 6 billion Yuan in two years to cover 1.5 million subscribers in the first phase. For this City Optical Network, ODN(optical distributional network) is the most important and most difficult to build because it has to be future proof, to guarantee at least 20 years reliability, because there is no standard on how to build such ODN, also because it is very difficult to build in some existed old community.

Zhang also explained the FTTH construction standard edited by Shanghai Telecom themselves. In this standard, they suggest to make one time split for less populated villa communities, and to make two times split for condo areas. The optical split ratio is suggest to be 1:64. The standard also requires to reduce the optical connector to expand transmission distance. In the standard, there are also requests on different kind of indoor or outdoor cabins. Besides, Shanghai Telecom also edited a training material on FTTH construction, established a simulated training environment, 1400 more technicians have accepted this training.

At last, Zhang gave his worries which are also suggestions on FTTx supplies. He said that telecom service providers care much about how quick they can repair the access network in case of broken cable, how to increase installation density for space limited ODN environments. He suggests suppliers to develop smaller package cable, prepared connector for ribbon cables.

In fact, from the small exhibition attached to this summit, FTTx component suppliers really are working on that direction. 8 exhibitors from Jiangsu, Zhejiang, even Korean took part in the show. They exhibited their FTTx products from fast connectors, prepared connector, V groove products to fast fiber splicing machine, and POF products. HG Genuine shows their full line FTTx transceivers on the show.