BANGALORE, INDIA: At your wits' end owing to slow broadband speed? Time to move on to to fiber.

Of late, fiber network has emerged as a strong alternative to the existing broadband accessing technology, DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) in India.

The India optical fiber market showed a CAGR of 43 per cent (from 2003-2008), making it the fastest growing market in the world. In no time, India saw an upcoming of VoIP and IPTV usage, which in turn calls for more bandwidth (copper wire has limited bandwidth compared to fiber). 

Low operational and maintenance cost, higher bandwidth and decreasing prices are further augmenting fiber network's growth, and today, it is all set to enter your homes to cater to speedier broadband requirements.

Telecoms vendor Ericsson recently deployed India's first-ever residential FTTH-GPON (Fiber-To-The-Home- Gigabit Passive Optical Network) project with Radius Synergies.

P Balaji, vice president, marketing & strategy, Ericsson, says: “Ericsson had its eyes on India's growing broadband base, ever since it strengthened its IP portfolio with the acquisition of  Entrisphere, way back in 2007. The adoption of fixed broadband access is seeing resurgence at the residential and enterprise levels and FTTH technology will play a critical role in driving this forward.” He was speaking to CIOL with regard to Ericsson's FTTH launch.

CIOL: The end-to-end fiber access solution from Ericsson is based on EDA 1500 GPON system, which offers the highest capacity available in the market and its Micronet and Ribbonet air-blown fiber, and microcable solutions. Can you elaborate on this?

P Balaji: Ericsson EDA (Ethernet Data Access) 1500 provides the highest capacity GPON solution in the world. Based on a carrier-class platform, EDA 1500 is key for the converged high-capacity, all-IP fiber networks needed for advanced services such as IPTV. It comprises Optical Line Terminal (OLT), Optical Network Terminals (ONTs) and EntriView.

“Ribbonet and Micronet” are ducting and fiber solutions for building the last mile access.

Ericsson's Ribbonet Air Blown Fiber (ABF) system has been developed specifically to provide fast, efficient and flexible fiber distribution in the drop and premises network for medium to long-distances.

Ericsson Micronet Air Blown Micro Cable system is useful when deploying metropolitan and access networks.

CIOL: Will FTTH solve bandwidth problem in India?

PB: FTTH is the way forward for wireline networks of the future as the need for large bandwidth applications grows. Fiber technology can accommodate such bandwidth requirements for applications and high-speed data transmissions with ease.

Fiber also has duplex transmission ability which means signals can be transmitted both ways-from exchange to customer and vice versa, which plays a vital role in applications such as interactive IPTV.