After water and electricity, should soon consider to subscribe to the fiber to the home. Carrying a light signal, fiber allows flow Internet between 60 to 100 megabits per second, putting the DSL technologies of copper for the turtle to the tale. But to bring this fiber in the user, the path to is expensive and complicated. Operators are shared between three possibilities: either connect fibre to node located at the corner of the street ("fiber to the node", FTTN), or bring down the building ("fiber to the building", hungry) or, finally, install the fiber directly to the home ("fiber to the home", FTTH).
"These technologies differ on one point: the distance between the end of the optical network and the beginning of the wireline network.". "Because, at one point, the fibre-optic switches on the wire of copper to arrive at the Subscriber", explains Daniel Caclin, CEO of Erenis. This operator brings fibre to the bottom of the building, more exactly in the basement or in the cellars of houses. Ten to thirty metres remaining to link the final Subscriber, pass through the telephone copper wire and VDSL2 (the technology the most advanced ADSL today).
"If we wanted to bring the fiber directly at the final Subscriber, that we would increase our investments by two", said Daniel Caclin. Erenis is now 7,800 customers and in WINS 400 new every week. It offers from now flows of 60 megabits per second.
Two technical options
Other actors, such as Citéfibre, Free or France Telecom, instead bringing fibre closer to users. At home. In this case, two configurations are possible. The first configuration, known as "point-to-multipoint", separates a single arrival of optical fiber in different branches to connect homes. The second configuration ("point to point") to bring to each user a unique fibre from end to end.
"You know that optical fibers twisted difficult." "Suddenly, in architecture point to point, need much more space to link them to the head of the network", explains Jean-Pierre Lartigue, Vice President of marketing for Alcatel. Bent or twisted optical fiber losing a large part of the flow, even if some observers believe that this constraint tends to disappear with new technologies. Point-to-multipoint architecture has the advantage of connect less fibre network, and therefore to place gain optical connection node (NRO). Fiber leverages only in approaching the homes of users through a "splitter", system non-powered energy ("passive optical network" or SOP). Theoretically can reach split a fiber into 64 branches for each apartment. Only concern, the initial bandwidth is divided by the number of users.
Some players, including Free, believe however that with point-to-multipoint architecture, deployed by France Télécom, it is technically impossible to open its network to competition (unbundling). The operator did not wish to comment on this subject. In addition, for this network structure, there are two technical options. The Gigabit PON (GPON) offers speeds of 1.2 to 2.5 gigabits shared between users and supports multiple protocols of communications (ATM, Ethernet,...). Ethernet PON (EPON), older technology based on the Ethernet standard, shows less important flows, and the fibre can be split only 32 times.
Difficult to assess cost
With these architectures point to multipoint, some preferred the point to point, such as Free or Citéfibre. "In a building with 20 apartments, you will have twenty fibres, all directly related to our optical connection node", explains Michael Boukobza, CEO of Free. It considers that there is no loss of flow between the Free network and the Subscriber, and, especially, that are symmetrical that data to the Subscriber and those from the Subscriber have equivalent throughput, which is not true for other technologies.
If different deployments bring each benefit, the cost, it remains difficult to assess. "We believe that, to connect 40 of the French population, would invest EUR 11.3 billion over 10 years for the technology point to point, against EUR 10.4 billion for point to multipoint GPON", said Roland Montagne, analyst for the Institute of audiovisual and telecommunications in Europe (Idate). But these figures are disputed by some players. A real bag of fibre.
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