Electrical Splitting OEO G-PON Reach Extender Demonstration

Fiber To The Home technology like G-PON [1], XG-PON1 [2] give the opportunity to consider CAPEX and OPEX reductions by decreasing the number of Central Offices (COs) because of systems optical performances. This reduction can lead to large optical budgets between the Optical Line Termination (OLT) and Optical Network Units (ONUs). ITU-T defined technical solutions such as C+ class transceivers [3] and 1:1 Reach Extenders (RE) [4] to answer to this requirement. REs are either based on all optical solutions involving Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers (SOAs) [5, 6], or on OEO implementation [7]. To address the required low cost, the access sided BOSAs use PIN diodes instead of APDs, low power lasers without isolator and TIAs without burst mode reset. For a product realization optical integration could further reduce the cost. In this paper, a 1:16 OEO RE based on electrical splitting is demonstrated and offers a total equivalent optical budget up to 58dB and addresses up to 128 ONUs. This work has been conducted with equipment supplied by Alcatel-Lucent.