As demand for higher-bandwidth residential services continues its steady growth, a number of service providers are looking to leverage their existing network infrastructures to provide differentiated triple-play services to their customers. These triple-play services consist of high-speed Internet or data services, telephony (VoIP) and both broadcast TV and video-on-demand.
Traditional networks use a combination of fiber optics and electrical links to deliver Ethernet services to customers. The fiber-optic links are mainly reserved for long-haul and metro applications, as they require high data rates. Due to the high cost of installing, implementing and maintaining a fiber network its use in customer-premises applications is limited. It is therefore the electrical links that are usually used for access and residential links as their easy installation and low cost are ideal for massive deployments.
As we know, however, electrical links are limited in bandwidth and in deployment lengths. As the cost and complexity of fiber-optic deployment decreases, fiber is becoming an increasingly viable medium for delivering high-bandwidth services to both business and residential customers. Two types of architectures propose fiber media from the central office (CO) to the customer premises, Passive optical networks (PONs) and Active Ethernet networks. The following article proposes a solution for Active Ethernet testing from the installation and service turn-up phase to service-level agreement verification for Active Ethernet deployments.