A comparative study of the modern access networks

A great extension of the Fiber To The Home (FTTH) services is provided by Internet service providers through using the Passive Optical Networks (PON) technology. Another technology offered by telecommunication companies is VDSL2. These providers offer not only data services, but also voice and video services, which are sensitive to latency, jitter, throughput and other network parameters. This article discusses the transmission capacity of metallic and optical (PON) networks for VoIP and video services. We used defined PON network topologies and VDSL network topologies for the measuring scenarios, utilizing PBX Asterisk for VoIP benchmarking. Tests based on RFC 2544, ITU-T Y.156sam and bit-error-test were performed. The parameters we compared in this article are jitter, call setup time, latency, throughput and frame-loss. Optical Networks are considered as the best choice, however, in this article we found that the VDSL2 networks show comparable performance, and sometimes they show better results in some parameters.