In reply to a post by candlerb:

The only existing products that come near to a reasonable ratio are 500/165 (very expensive), followed by the basic 80/20. If they kept that 4:1 ratio for higher bands then we'd have a 330/80 product which would be very attractive - to the point that it would significantly dampen demand for the new 550/75 and 1000/115 products shortly to be launched.

They could differentiate the higher bands with 500/250 and 1000/500 products. As you said it's 2:1 at the PON level and 1:1 everywhere else. I personally think that keeping the 4:1 ratio and doing 160/40 and 320/80 would have been the reasonable thing to do, and then offer the XG-PON offerings at 2:1.

There is actually another issue with PON technology that is not widely acknowledge. That is it has higher latency than a point to point connection. Basically GPON is time division multiplexed so when you want to transmit it has to wait for your slot to come around. Where as point to point would just transmit immediately.

In reply to a post by jabuzzard:

Basically GPON is time division multiplexed so when you want to transmit it has to wait for your slot to come around.

This is true, but it dynamically allocates more timeslot shares to the busiest transmitters, so in practice you're unlikely to notice. I believe it even measures and compensates for the different round-trip times to each of the subscribers (due to different fibre lengths), to make maximum use of the uplink channel.

In reply to a post by jabuzzard:

There is actually another issue with PON technology that is not widely acknowledge. That is it has higher latency than a point to point connection. Basically GPON is time division multiplexed so when you want to transmit it has to wait for your slot to come around. Where as point to point would just transmit immediately.

That's pretty much a non issue, especially for residential connections.
When compared to previous xDSL connections the latency on GPON will still be better.

Additional latency from TDM / DBA on a PON will be µs not ms.

Yeah not sure that Cat5e was a sensible choice as you are kind of stuck at 2.5Gbps max (assuming you deploy NBaseT) without recabling. Would have made much more sense to use Cat6a and have the option of a full 10Gbps.