Comprehensive Understanding Of Fiber To Home FTTH

What is Fiber to Home FTTH?

Fiber to the home (FTTH) is a transmission method for fiber optic communication. As the name suggests, it directly connects the fiber optic cable to the user terminal. FTTH is an access method in FTTx, what is FTTx?

FTTX is a collective term for various application types of broadband optical access networks. "X" has various variants, including Fiber to Building (FTTB), Fiber to Handover Box (FTTCab), Fiber to Roadside (FTTC), Fiber to Desktop (FTTD), Fiber to Home (FTTH), Fiber to Resident (FTTP), Fiber to Office (FTTO), Fiber to User (FTTu), and so on.

The scope of FTTx technology ranges from office equipment in regional telecommunications rooms to user terminal equipment, including optical line terminals (OLT), optical network units (ONU), and optical network terminals (ONT).

From the figure, it can be seen that FTTH is all connected to the terminal through a fiber optic network, and the terminal connected to it is called the Optical Network Terminal (ONT). FTTB or FTTC is connected to the building or Curb through a fiber optic network, and then to the terminal through a copper twisted pair network or wireless connection. The end device of the fiber optic network is called an optical network unit (ONU), which is connected to the network terminal (NT) through a copper twisted pair network or wireless connection. FTTCab is similar to FTTC, except that its ONU is located in the telecommunications cabinet. The FTTB, FTTC, and FTTCab in the figure all belong to "partial" fiber to the home, which means that the fiber is not directly connected to the end user, but reaches the vicinity of the end user, and then connects to the end user through a twisted pair network. In FTTCab, the ONU in the telecommunications handover box is usually 1000-2000m away from the end users, and in this case, one ONU unit can support about 500 end users. In FTTC, ONU is closer to end users, ranging from 200-1000m, and can support 8-32 end users. The network between OLT and ONT/ONU is called the Optical Distribution Network (ODN), and its distance can reach 20km, as shown in the figure.