Sustainability of FTTH and FTTC Access Networks

Abstract:
The goal of this investigation is to examine the sustainability (mainly power consumption, but also weight as an indicator for the required resources for the production and disposal) of different FTTC and FTTH access technologies. Several scenarios have been considered: rural areas, urban areas, a provisioning all over Germany as well as of the city of Haltern am See with real data of the existing access network. It has been found, that the considered FTTH technologies GPON and point-to-point are more sustainable than FTTC networks in all scenarios considered although for FTTC some optimistic and for FTTH conservative assumptions were made.