Low Cost Method for Testing, Troubleshooting and Monitoring of Passive Optical Network – Towards the Installation of Centralized Failure Troubleshooting System (CFTS)

This paper presents the simplest and fastest technique on testing and troubleshooting a passive optical network (PON) using handheld optical power meter and optical time domain reflectometer (OTDR). This provides a faster, simpler, and less complex way for installation testing, service activation testing, and network performance monitoring and troubleshooting a PON network without need of optical spectrum analyzer (OSA). The architecture is divided into 2 parts; electronic application injection and optical layer. Two units of handheld optical power meters is used as the injected wavelength and measurement meter for the triple-play (data, voice, and video) services. The whole network status line-to-line connection could be troubleshot with OTDR for further processing. Finally, we proposed the automatic monitoring network scanning to define the status of network by using our developed program by means of Smart Access Network Testing Analyzing and Database (SANTAD). A very simple set up and visual basic programming enable all status lines can be displayed and monitored onto one computer screen by means of Centralized Failure Troubleshooting System (CFTS).