the ONT itself is going to be very high performance connected to fiber, so it itself is high performance, and often times can have multiple ports connecting to different devices. But, what is your general recommendations on planning for bandwidth in terms of the number of ONTs you’re going to need?

Most ONTs offer either four ports or eight ports, depending on how many devices you’re going to hook up. So if you’re going to hook up to a lot of wireless access points that consume a lot of bandwidth, that would be a consideration. One of the things you can do from the ONTs is dynamic bandwidth allocation. This allows you to  go into each ONT and each port and allocate a certain amount of bandwidth guaranteed per port, and then you can also have the ability to burst, too. So it really depends on the different bandwidth requirements of the devices that are going to plug into the ONT.

In a POL, the Optical Network Terminal (ONT) is can be wall mounted or ceiling mounted. The do not need to be an enclosure unless they are in a place where they might be accessed by the public — say, in a hotel or an MDU. In that case, they would likely be put in an in-wall enclosure.

Each ONT end device just requires one strand of single mode fiber. And the connectors typically used in passive optical LAN are SC/APC angle polish connectors. Note: some manufacturers now offer a way to leverage multimode fiber in applications where the fiber plant was already installed.

In a Passive Optical LAN each ONT end device requires  one strand of single-mode fiber. The connectors typically used in passive optical LAN are SC/APC angle polish connectors on the end. If you have existing single mode in your backbone, then you’re halfway there.

Yes, there are several differences. First, the PON power meter is a pass through device which measures the power of the downstream signal and the power of the upstream signal. A regular power meter is a single ended detector, so you can measure the downstream power, but then you can not validate that your ONT’s properly emitting because you cannot measure the upstream. That’s the first difference. Also, on your PON power meter you  have preconfigured thresholds for the different wavelengths according to the different PON layers that you could have GPON, XGS PON, and GP PON2, all of those.

PON is the general concept of Passive Optical Networking, which refers to the use of splitter typologies in point to multipoint technologies where one fiber is split out to multiple endpoints. GPON is the 2.5 Gbps Passive Optical Network, while NG-PON is in general, everything which is Next Generation, meaning 10 Gbps and beyond.  In the standards they talk about Next Gen PON1, which is then the 10 Gbps variants, and Next Gen PON2, which are then the TWDM PON,

The leading cause of network failures is dirty connections. Almost all the time, the dirt is completely invisible to the naked eye, but since the diameter of a fiber core is so small (50 microns for multimode fiber and only 8 microns for singlemode fiber) it doesn’t take much to block the light on the fiber endface.

When the dust cap is removed the ferrule end face can easily be contaminated by direct contact with skin oil, grease, salt, fingerprints, lint, uncured epoxy, grime or dust. Even just open air exposure may result in moisture and dust sticking to the end-face. When the dust caps are off your connectors are at risk of contamination.

This is why proper inspection and cleaning techniques are so important, especially with today’s tight loss budgets where too much loss from a dirty connection can have a direct impact on bit error rate, insertion loss and optical return loss which will impact system performance and reliability.

Since the POL is an enterprise adaptation of the GPON used in Fiber-to-the-Home applications, you can use the same tools and expertise that were developed for GPON.The recommended testing protocols for a passive optical LAN deployment are:

• Inspecting the connector
• Fiber characterization, with different tools like OLTS, OTDR, iOLM
• Validating service activation using a PON power meter
• Reporting tests and test results

In fiber optic networks, 80% of the problems are caused by dirty or damaged optical connectors, 10% of network problems are due to macrobends, which are responsible for signal loss and network quality deterioration, and the remaining 10% of problems can be attributed to other components – the ONT, the OLT and the splitters.

Passive optical LAN (POL) architectures primarily use single-mode fiber because of the medium’s high capacity and ability to support long link lengths — up to 20 km. In a POL architecture. In a POL, a passive single-mode fiber network runs down to the desktop, through an optical splitter and into a thin-client edge device or Optical Network Terminal (ONT). Recently single-mode to multimode optical splitters have been introduced that enable cost-effective re-use of existing multimode fiber cabling for Passive Optical LANs inside buildings and across a campus.