Why PON Technology
The critical applications driving communication technology development are High Definition television, streaming video with personalised advertisements, gaming, video telephony, storage and backup for pictures and home video, and sharing of personal content via homepages.
Service Providers will need to improve their access networks to meet these new customer demands.. The most common demands are for higher bandwidth and improved service reliability and simplicity for the fieldforce.
Optical fibre technology offers the best solution for obtaining higher bandwidth and improved reliability. There are two competing technologies available, Active Fiber To The Premises (Active) FTT) and Passive Optical Network Fiber To The Premises (PON) FTTP. 
Active FTTP
These are point-to point-networks that utilise powered electronics in the field to drive the layer 2/layer 3 switching and routing, offloading full layer 3 routing to the Carrier’s local exchange. These networks deliver to the customer up to 100 Mbit/s full-duplex over a single mode optical fibre.
PON FTTP
These networks do not require powered electronics in the field and are the C-COR Broadband preferred access infrastructure solution.
Providing cost effective, FTTx passive standards compliant network solutions for telecom and community network applications.
The PON Advantage
PON technology avoids the placement of electronics in the field by using passive optical filters (splitters) to distribute optical circuits to individual customers. They reduce the amount of fibre and local exchange and field equipment needed.
In PON architecture the prime switching and routing is handled at the Carrier’s local exchange. At the customer’s premises optical signals are processed and routed to individual devices as, video, voice or data.
The key advantage of this technology is that the optical splitter does not require power lowering both the installation and operating cost. By removing a potential point of failure, namely the power supply, the risk of downtime is also reduced, providing a more reliable system.