Flexible Remotely Dual-Pumped Long-Reach PON

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a flexible network architecture for converged metro-access environment. Entire passiveness in the fiber plant is achieved with remote amplification in the signal distribution nodes along the metro ring and in the power splitters of the local access tree. We assist a traditional remote pumping scheme with a distributed pump provided by the optical network units and demonstrate that loss budgets beyond 30 dB can be supported. Data transmission of up to 10 Gb/s is evaluated in different deployment scenarios, reaching from a 78 km long reach rural to a dense 1:128 split urban configuration with field installed fibers.