Sterlite Fiber Café Concept

The Sterlite Fiber Café is a unique touch and feel experience center where the concept of 'Optical Fiber-to-the-desk' (FTTD). This was demonstrated for the first time in India at India Telecom 2006. 

The Sterlite Fiber Café allows visitors to experience true broadband via an Optical Fiber based infrastructure through exciting and interactive, real-time high bandwidth intensive applications for Business and Entertainment. These applications include Movies-on-Demand, Music-on-Demand, Online Gaming, IPTV, P2P, VoIP, Video Conferencing, Surveillance and other applications from a single portal. 

Industry Trends - The Voice-Data-Video Transition

Imagine a day when you would be able to have an hour-long meeting with the client sitting in your office, instead of spending an eternity traveling to the client's office for the same meeting. 

Imagine a day when you would be able to get an expert doctor based out of Johns Hopkins University, to monitor a medical operation happening in Indore. 

Imagine a day when you would be able to watch 'Big Boss' and the 'News at 9' at the time that you wish, instead of the pre-subscribed airing time by the channel

Imagine a day when you would be able to attend classes online and fulfill all requirements of a Harvard MBA, without ever visiting Harvard. 

Imagine a day when you would be able to download a DVD quality print of 'Lage Raho Munna Bhai' from the Internet in a few seconds, and watch it on your home theatre system. 

This day is not very far away. Increasingly, all personal and corporate devices have capabilities to transmit, record and play videos be it your cell phone or PDA or Laptop or TV Set-top Box. Transmitting personalized videos is becoming the order of the day. 

The applications are manifold with far reaching consequences on individual and corporate productivity. 

Applications are visibly moving from voice to data to video, not just as a demand from individual subscribers, but have also become an irreplaceable aspect in our daily working lives. 

Optical Fiber is the only technology currently available with capability of simultaneously transmitting terabits over each fiber with bandwidth hungry applications currently available and increasing required, optical fiber networks would need to get closer to the subscriber through the deployment of FTTx networks. 

Technology / Optical Fiber Network

Fiber-to-the-Desk (FTTD) is a step ahead of the concept of Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH). 

There are various ways to build a network using fiber optic cables as a means for providing the high bandwidth highways up to each application device - be it PC/Computer or Television. 

The Sterlite Fiber Café made use of a Passive Optical Network (PON) whereby each device was remotely connected with the operating server (that assimilated various bandwidth intensive applications) through an OLT and each PC. Computer was fitted with an Optical Network Terminal Card. 

Fiber Optic Cable with Conventional Single Mode Optical Fiber (CSMF) was used to provide remote connectivity between computers and the server. The optical signal from Server/Optical Line Terminal was split equally using an Optical Splitter and each computer received this signal. The equipments used were based on ITU-T G.984 GPON specs. The wavelengths 1490nm and 1310nm were respectively used for the downstream and upstream traffic. 

Single Mode Fiber used in the optical network has to undergo critical bends and curves during installation of the cable. If not used in proper manner specific to the properties of fiber/ fiber optic cable, the link itself could become an attenuation box wherein the signal at receiver end could become feeble or undergo a complete loss and one may not be able to achieve the intended communication. 

In order to overcome this, a class of specialty single mode optical fibers called 'Bend Insensitive fibers' has been introduced especially for FTTx applications. Bend insensitive fibers have a unique and exclusive application in FTTH/D deployment to support cable with minimum bend radius of ~36mm, which cannot be supported by conventional single mode fiber due to high macro and micro bending losses. 

The bandwidth highways built in this manner are permanent gateways that provide an unlimited bandwidth capacity platform without any further conversion of signals from Optical-to-Electrical-to-Optical. As the conversion happens at the application device, problems such as time delay/lag, synchronization etc. can be reduced to minimum to give the user an experience of real time Voice/ Video. 

The network demonstrated at the Sterlite Fiber Café was an all-optical Internet Protocol (IP) based network. Sterlite will demonstrate the Fiber Café concept again at the Convergence India to be the held in New Delhi from 20 March to 22 March 2007.

Source: http://cablequest.org/articles/advertising/item/1271-sterlite-fiber-caf%C3%A9-concept.htmlSource: http://cablequest.org/articles/advertising/item/1271-sterlite-fiber-caf%C3%A9-concept.html