Cost Vs. Redundancy in FTTH Access Networks:A Case Study of a Danish Village

This paper studies the feasibility of offering redundancy within the access network by planning an access network using the ear topology. This proposed network is compared to a traditional tree structured access network. The basic idea of the ear topology is to offer two individual fibers from separate distribution nodes to NT's. The cost of the ear topology is kept down by reusing trenches making extra digging minimal. The results show however that the ear topology with the home-run method is not suitable compared to the tree topology due to the extra fibers needed. Further work could apply the PON architecture to the ear topology, reducing the amount of fibers