Billions of dollars are spent annually delivering high speed fiber networks to Multi-Dwelling Units (MDUs) —apartments, condos, and student-housing—across North America. Service providers recognize the rich potential returns on a fiber investment in such high-density markets. Fiber connections will bring fast, reliable, content-rich services to millions of households. However, poor planning of fiber network interfaces and service delivery to a consumer’s media devices can leave everyone, from the builder/developer and building owner to the service provider and tenants/subscribers, frustrated.
The ideal solution is to work with a fiber network service provider to develop a design that meets not only the provider’s service delivery needs, but also works with the unique requirements of the MDU.
There are a number of fiber network architectures that service providers use for deployment of fiber-to-the-premise (FTTP) services. Passive optical network (PON) with RF over fiber (RFoG) overlay seems to be the current choice of most major US CATV MSO’s.
MDU’s are adding security cameras and directory channels to their CATV programming. As shown in Fig.1 For a small property a local video insertion is a straight forward job. Using one of the Radiant Communications Corporation MDU FTTH encoders, a video signal is being digitally encoded and inserted optically through fiber transmission into the CATV lineup.
A challenge is present in some large properties, such as high rise buildings, gated communities and campus environments. Due to the high number of subs in those properties multiple fiber deep nodes must be used. The challenge here is how to insert the same content at each node. One approach is to use a dedicated MDU FTTH encoder at each node.
Due to high quality HD video encoding, modulation and optical components used in Radiant’ s encoders the optical signal can be split and feed up to four optical hubs simultaneously, this way providing live local insertion channels for up to 512 subs with one device. A similar design serving 256 subscribers using Radiant’s MDU FTTH encoder bundled with an optical coupler is shown on Fig.2.
