Vectoring brings renewed life to copper

In an age of fiber, copper still serves a prominent role for many industries, but integrating the two can be tricky. For many firms, this means taking the time and eating the cost of replacing all of their copper-based network with fiber, which doesn't always serve the same purpose or supply the same usability, depending on the need. However, advances are giving new life to copper that enterprises cannot ignore - and could save them time and money.

According to Commsday, noise reduction technology called vectoring is giving copper a "new lease on life," for government and industry use. Rather than struggling to replace network infrastructure, firms will be able to utilize the same wiring with minor investments in vectoring and fiber to copper media converter solutions.

Vectoring
Fundamentally, vectoring is the cancelation of crosstalk noise over copper wire. Ratified as a standard by the International Telecommunications Union in 2010, this method effectively keeps noise from holding back VDSL from achieving design speeds. This can optimize FTTH networks, as well as current Ethernet media converter needs in the enterprise.

"VDSL2 is fantastic compared to ADSL; you get 100Mbps downstream if you test it in the lab, at 400m," Steffaan Vanhastel of Alcatel-Lucent noted, according to the news source. "Unfortunately, once you actually deploy VDSL2 and take it out of lab conditions, you don't get that 100Mbps, because of the crosstalk between the telephone lines in the same binders - you maybe [get] 30-60Mbps, a significant drop."

Numerous factors affect crosstalk noise, which makes minimizing it a priority. Some with no problems one day could have their speeds significantly reduced the next, and traffic patterns can change at any time, making maintaining steady speeds impossible.

Converters
For FTTH deployment, the fiber to copper conversion is critical, and if vectoring can optimize noise reduction, firms need to ensure they are utilizing the right media converters to enhance the connection as well in order to finalize full deployment. Cross talk becomes a bigger problem at longer loop lengths, and eliminating noise at higher priority points will optimize performance.

Providers need to ensure they are offering the best possible connection speeds with FTTH deployments and eliminate avoidable problems. Combining the advantages of media converters with vectoring will help optimize these solutions and focus FTTH efforts on coverage and service, rather than overcoming technical obstacles.

Perle has an extensive range of Managed and Unmanaged Fiber Media Converters to extended copper-based Ethernet equipment over a fiber optic link, multimode to multimode and multimode to single mode fiber up to 160km.