PON for the Office / Home

Does this exist - the use of PON technology in the office or home?

Seems like it is ideally suited to the office with many workstations.

Edited by Eeeps (Fri 20-Dec-24 14:04:33)

I'm confused as to what benefit this bring over fibre or cat6 capable solutions

In reply to a post by Taras:

I'm confused as to what benefit this bring over fibre or cat6 capable solutions

Point to multi-point.
Reduction in cable requirements.

Also, remote switch stacks can potentially be removed with a few fibres direct to coms rooms.

In reply to a post by Eeeps:

Seems like it is ideally suited to the office with many workstations.

Many offices have gone WiFi for end user compute, and ditched telephones, so only mains electricity cabling required. In data centres, 25 GigE over copper is easy at managed distances. Point-to-point fibre has been around decades, for your front end network and for your data network (e.g. SAN).

The benefits of a PON are where you have geographical range to cover, such as a town, so that its not something I can see a reason to go with. Shared bandwidth is always worse in a data centre.

In reply to a post by Eeeps:

In reply to a post by Taras:

I'm confused as to what benefit this bring over fibre or cat6 capable solutions

Point to multi-point.
Reduction in cable requirements.

Also, remote switch stacks can potentially be removed with a few fibres direct to coms rooms.

I've seen various organisations attempt fibre to the desk over the years, and it never succeeds. Usually one person in the organisation has a pyrrhic dream...reality soon dawns.

Generally offices use a fibre backbone to switches that are local to the users (and in a wider basis fibre to connect WAN sites). It isn't dissimilar - fibre comes into the building then into a fibre switch which then takes fibres to the local cabs where copper is generally used to deliver to the device.

Copper is much easier to run in an office and connects straight into end device network ports.

And as someone else said more and more moving towards WiFi first so far fewer cables to end devices - the cabled end devices generally being the wireless access points, fixed desktops and printers.

PON solves a different problem than exists in an office though - office fit outs put the money into raised floors and cable trays so that adding another five data outlets can be done in a couple of hours after people have gone home, and the tools to terminate Cat6 cable are cheap and require very little training to use. PON is designed to keep cabling in limited capacity ducts to a minimum which isn't a problem in a cable tray under a floor.

If you built an office using PON then you either overprovision and waste money, or you have to light up a new OLT port to add one additional user. You also have to come up with a way to power IP phones and access points. I'd be surprised if the OLT and ONTs to support 60 connections uses less power than a couple of mGig PoE switches.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

I've seen various organisations attempt fibre to the desk over the years, and it never succeeds.

I've seen it used, 20+ yeras ago at 10 Mbps ... it was insane, the cards for the PCs and adaptors for printers blew the budget. It worked though...

Yep. When I say it never succeeds, I meant from a commercially sustainable approach.

Edit: Just be clear before the nitpickers kick into gear 😅- by this I mean mass rollout of fibre to the desktop in a general commercial office setting - so not HPC, or other relatively obscure setups like high-end film production, graphics or post processing. There are some viable use cases.

Edited by Pheasant (Sat 21-Dec-24 09:33:41)

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Yep. When I say it never succeeds, I meant from a commercially sustainable approach.

It was cost (due to how rare the cards were) that killed the project. They moved eventually to "fibre to the room" and a local distribution on copper. Switches, even back then, were the right place to do fibre.