Evolution options for broadband residential networks

Interest in broadband networks, capable of supporting multimedia services in a residential area is flourishing, and developments in digital compression schemes have allowed enormous channel capacities to be considered. There are different evolutionary routes which could be pursued to evolve current networks to this goal. One option is to use dedicated fiber feeders to active nodes, each serving a few hundred customers on a shared tree and branch coaxial network. The alternative is to puruse a more fiber intensive approach. The fiber intensive approach is compared to the fiber-coax approach within a telco environment, and the way in which the fiber approach could evolve is examined.