A customer support issue from decades ago remains fresh in Bernd Hesse’s mind. He saw first-hand at Raynet that it was not possible to implement a physical upgrade to the optical last-mile network without significant service disruption. In the above interview, filmed at FBA’s Fiber Connect 2023, he contends that this issue remains.
Like his past efforts, with groups such as the NGPON2 Forum and the WDM PON Forum, Hesse’s solution is to bring the industry together to focus on this issue. The starting point is a LinkedIn group, Open ODN. Hesse, who is also the Chief Marketing Officer for the Broadband Forum, is calling on vendors, operators, and engineering companies to be part of this online forum.
Hesse’s aspiration for this group is, “The goal is to offer any service in the future without downtime on existing services.”
That may seem like a high bar, but it wasn’t too long ago that the total bandwidth shared amongst 1,800+ customers would be less than what is considered broadband today.
Interview Highlights:
- 00:23 – Bernd tells the story of how a FITL upgrade meant approximately 1,800 customers lost their POTS service, which was a big deal in the early 1990s.
- 01:17 – “The goal is to offer any service in the future without downtime on existing services.”
- 02:05 – This is like other industry forums that Hesse has started and helped grow.
- 02:48 – The forum is open to anyone interested in achieving the forum’s goal.
Notes:
- Raynet was a pioneer in FITL (Fiber in the Loop) technologies. Raynet’s deployment with the Deutsche Telekom was the world’s first operational combined telephone and video fiber optic system for the local loop. Also known as Fiber to the Curb, the fiber would terminate near the subscriber into an Optical Network Unit (aka, Subscriber Interface Unit) which would have an interface to the copper and, in the case of the DT deployment, a coaxial network.
- This author had the pleasure of working at Raynet with Bernd.
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