SC262 Alternative Broadband Access: Wired and Wireless Technologies for the Last Mile

Sunday, March 22, 2009
1:00 p.m.–4:00 p.m.
Paul Henry; AT&T Labs, Res., USA
Level: Advanced Beginner (basic understanding of topic is necessary to follow course material)

Course Description

Local access, variously called the “last mile Passive Optical Networks”, “first mile” and just plain “bottleneck,” presents formidable challenges to the communications engineer. Especially in the broadband arena, the twin objectives of high performance and very low (consumer-level) cost are especially daunting. There has been no shortage of proposed solutions to this problem, with wire, wireless and fiber technologies all represented. Even now, new ones continue to appear. While fiber is often considered to be the “ultimate” solution because of its huge bandwidth capacity, it has not displaced the alternatives, and likely will not do so any time soon. Indeed, the popularity of smart portable devices, such as iPhone, suggests that mobility may give wireless technologies a decisive advantage over tethered alternatives, including fiber. In any case, for the foreseeable future we will be dealing with a range of access technologies.

This Short Course is an introduction to the major broadband access technologies that offer alternatives to fiber: digital subscriber loop (xDSL), hybrid fiber coax (HFC), 3G cellular (especially LTE) and WiMAX. The goal is to “make sense” of the vast array of available approaches—to identify similarities, expose key differences, and map out the ground where upcoming access battles will be fought. Intuitive arguments, plus occasional back-of-the-envelope calculations, will provide insight into key system strengths and weaknesses. Beyond basic technical considerations, the course will assess, by means of elementary deployment scenarios, the economic drivers (e.g. initial vs. incremental deployment cost) that can make or break a business case. To ensure that it stays grounded in reality, the course will make frequent comparisons between the performance predicted by our models, and the results achieved in real-world deployments.

Benefits and Learning Objectives

This course should enable you to:

• Compare candidate technologies for broadband access.
• Do first-cut design of alternative approaches.
• Calculate performance and cost of these designs.
• Select the best access technology according to service, regional and market segment needs.

Intended Audience

This course is for engineers, managers and service providers who desire an introductory (but nonetheless quantitative) understanding of broadband access alternatives.

Biography

Paul S. Henry is a member of the Access Research Division at AT&T Labs, where his interests focus on bringing high-speed Internet connectivity to homes and businesses. After receiving his doctorate in physics from Princeton University, Mr. Henry joined AT&T (Bell) Labs, where he has been engaged in research on communications circuits and systems. He has published papers or patented inventions in several fields, including millimeter-wave radio, cosmology, optical fiber and powerline communications, wireless systems and data security. Henry is a Fellow of the IEEE and was the keynote speaker at Infocom 2002 (New York) and ICCCP 2005 (Muscat, Oman).