What are pon and Epon?

The English abbreviation of PON Passive optical network (passive optical network), compared with active optical access technology, PON eliminates the active equipment between the end and the client, which makes maintenance simple, high reliability, low cost, and can save fiber resources, is the main solution of FTTH in the future. With the gradual reduction of the cost of PON, not only does Pon have a certain application market in FTTB/FTTC, but also the use of PON to achieve FTTH in Japan and other developed countries have made great progress. At present, the PON technology mainly has apon, EPON and Gpon, the main difference is that different two-layer technology is used.

Apon is the 90 's in the middle of the ITU and the full Service Access Network Forum (FSAN) standardized PON technology, Fsan at the end of 2001 Apon renamed to Bpon,apon the highest rate of 622Mbps, the second layer is the ATM packaging and transmission technology, Therefore, there are insufficient bandwidth, complex technology, high price and low efficiency of carrying IP service, which fail to achieve success in the market.

To better adapt to IP services, the first Mile Ethernet Federation (EFMA) introduced Epon technology at two-tier Ethernet instead of ATM in early 2001, and the IEEE 802.3ah Working Group standardized it Epon can support a 1.25Gbps symmetric rate and will upgrade to 10Gbps in future. Epon products get a greater degree of commercial, because it combines Ethernet technology and PON technology, thus becoming a very suitable for IP Services broadband access technology. The EPON system for gbit/s rate is also often called ge-pon.

At the same time, EFMA proposed the Epon concept, Fsan also proposed that Gpon,fsan and ITU have standardized it, and its technical feature is to use the ITU-T definition of GFP (Universal frame code) to encapsulate and map the Ethernet, TDM, ATM and other services in the two-layer. can provide 1.25 and 2.5gb/s downlink rate and all standard uplink rate, and has powerful OAM function. Gpon has a clear advantage in terms of high rates and support for multiple businesses, but the cost is now higher than epon, and the maturity of the product is also inferior to epon.