A survey of trends and motivations regarding Communication Service Providers' metro area network implementations

TL;DR

This survey analyzes current metro area network implementations by Communication Service Providers, highlighting trends such as remote node deployment and the persistence of copper media, to inform future research and development.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of current practices and trends in metro area networks, combining quantitative data and expert insights to identify key deployment patterns.

Findings

Large subscriber providers are less agile to technological change.

Copper media remains important in access networks.

Remote access nodes are widely deployed for distributed architectures.

Abstract

Relevance of research on telecommunications networks is predicated upon the implementations which it explicitly claims or implicitly subsumes. This paper supports researchers through a survey of Communications Service Providers current implementations within the metro area, and trends that are expected to shape the next-generation metro area network. The survey is composed of a quantitative component, complemented by a qualitative component carried out among field experts. Among the several findings, it has been found that service providers with large subscriber base sizes, are less agile in their response to technological change than those with smaller subscriber base sizes: thus, copper media are still an important component in the set of access network technologies. On the other hand, service providers with large subscriber base sizes are strongly committed to deploying distributed access architectures, notably using remote access nodes like remote OLT and remote MAC-PHY. This study also shows that the extent of remote node deployment for multi-access edge computing is about the same as remote node deployment for distributed access architectures, indicating that these two aspects of metro area networks are likely to be co-deployed.