POF - Plastic Optical Fibre

Plastic fibre slashes network costs.


Plans in the 1990s to bring ultra-high speed telecom lines into every home foundered because the optical fibre infrastructure was just too expensive. But a new European project using plastic fibre and off-the-shelf components could make optical networking so cheap and simple that anyone could install it.
What happened to the dream of optical fibre in every home? While the core of the telecoms network, the long-distance trunk routes, use optical fibre, the links from the exchange to individual homes remain almost entirely copper wire. Telecoms companies have been creative in pushing copper to its limit with ADSL broadband technology and leveraging existing TV cable infrastructure (especially France and the Benelux), but only by taking optical fibre right into the home can they meet the demands for ever-faster connections.
The truth is, it’s too expensive. Ambitious plans to rip out the copper and lay optical fibre were largely abandoned in 2001 when telecoms companies realised that they could not afford the mounting costs. Only a few countries, notably Japan, have pushed ahead on any scale.
“The cost was way too high to be sustainable,” says Alessandro Nocivelli, the founder and CEO of Luceat SpA, one of the partners in the EU-funded POF-ALL project. “There was no business model to support such an investment.”
The object of POF-ALL is to find a technical solution to this rising cost. The partners decided to focus on the cabling inside buildings, which would typically account for 30% of the cost of laying an optical fibre from the exchange into the home. This last hundred metres or so is known as the ‘edge’ network.
“We realised that we could lower the cost of this edge installation by using a simpler technology,” says Nocivelli. “If we could employ a technology which is so simple to use that anyone can install it, that would relieve telecom companies of 30% of the cost of the access network, which means up to several billion euro if you consider the European Union as a whole.”
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