Point-to-Point (P2P, also known as Active Fiber) is the simplest of all three Fiber To The Home fundamental architectures. With a point-to-point network architecture, a fiber (typically only a single fiber) is installed from each subscriber’s house directly into the Central Office serving that subscriber.  This architecture has the advantage of simplicity, but it does require terminating lots of fiber cables in the Central Office (CO).

Active Fiber Architecture

With Active Fiber, the CO contains a high port count aggregation device (one port per subscriber) known as an Optical Line Terminal or OLT. A single optical fiber connects each subscriber’s house to the Central Office. An Optical Network Terminal (ONT) is installed either on the side of the subscriber’s house (typical in the US) or inside the subscriber’s house (not typical in the US).

Advantages

Active Fiber has an advantage in that no port is shared in any way, thus troubleshooting problems on the network is greatly simplified.  With this simple architecture, optical problems can be easily isolated. Additionally, this architecture has the highest bandwidth potential.  Links are easily upgraded to higher rates (requires new optics and electronics on both ends however), and each additional fiber linearly adds more aggregate bandwidth to the network.

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