Wireless Local Loop

In the telephone networks, the circuit between the subscriber's equipment (e.g. telephone set) and
the local exchange is called the subscriber loop or local loop. Copper wire has been used as the
medium for local loop to provide voice and voice-band data services. Since 1980s, the demand
for communications services has increased explosively. There has been a great need for the basic
telephone service, i.e. the plain old telephone service (POTS) in developing countries.
Wireless local loop provides two-ways a telephone system. Wireless local loop includes cordless
access system, proprietary fixed radio access system and fixed cellular system. It is also known
as fixed radio wireless. This can be in an office or home.
Broadband Wireless Access (BWA), Radio In The Loop (RITL), Fixed-Radio Access (FRA) and
Fixed Wireless Access (FWA).
Some key points on WLL are,
It is a point-to-point communication
Microwave platform
Fixed wireless communication does not require feeds from satellite or from the local phone
service. This reduces the cost and time for planning miles of cable.

ADVANTAGE

Fast Development
Low Construction Cost
Low Operation And Maintenance Cost
Costumer Connection Cost
High Bandwidth Services Provision
Lower Network Extension Costs
High System Capacity

Fiber To The Home

Fiber to the home (FTTH) is the delivery of a communications signal over optical
fiber from the operators switching equipment all the way to a home or business,
thereby replacing existing copper infrastructure such as telephone wires and coaxial
cable. Fiber to the home is a relatively new and fast growing method of providing
vastly higher bandwidth to consumers and businesses, and thereby enabling more
robust video, internet and voice services.

Fiber To The Home Architectures

New network architectures have been developed to reduce the cost of installing
high bandwidth services to the home, often lumped into the acronym FTTx for "fiber
to the x". These include FTTC for fiber to the curb, also called FTTN or fiber to the
node, FTTH for fiber to the home and FTTP for fiber to the premises, using
"premises" to include homes, apartments, condos, small businesses, etc.

FTTH Active Star Network

The simplest way to connect homes with fiber is to have a fiber link connecting
every home to the phone company switches, either in the nearest central office
(CO) or to a local active switch.

FTTH PON: Passive Optical Network

A PON system allows sharing expensive components for FTTH. A passive splitter
that takes one input and splits it to broadcast to many users cuts the cost of the
links susbstantially by sharing, for example, one expensive laser with up to 32
homes. PON splitters are bi-directional, that is signals can be sent downstream from
the central office, broadcast to all users, and signals from the users can be sent
upstream and combined into one fiber to communicate with the central
office.Because of all the splitters and short links, plus since some systems are
designed for AM video like CATV systems, non-reflective connectors (like the SC-APC
angle-polished connector) are generally used.
The splitter can be one unit in a single location as shown above or several splitters
cascaded as shown below. Cascaded splitters can be used to reduce the amount of
fiber needed in a network by placing splitters nearer the user. The split ratio is the
split of each coupler multiplied together, so a 4-way splitter folllowed by a 8-way
splitter would be a 32-way split. Cascading is usually done when houses being
served are clustered in smaller groups. Splitters are sometimes housed in the
central office and individual fibers run from the office to each subscriber. This can
enhance serviceability of the network since all the network hardware is in one
location at only a small penalty in overall cost for either dense urban areas or long
rural systems.
Most PON splitters are 1X32 or 2X32 or some smaller number of splits in a binary
sequence (2, 4,8, 16, 32, etc.). Couplers are basically symmetrical, say 32X32, but
PON architecture doesn't need but one fiber connection on the central office side, or
maybe 2 so one is available for monitoring, testing and as a spare, so the other
fibers are cut off. Couplers work by splitting the signal equally into all the fibers on
the other side of the coupler, Splitters add considerable loss to a FTTH link, limiting
the distance of a FTTH link compared to typical point-to-point telco link. When
designing a fiber optic network, here are guidelines on loss in PON couplers.

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet
protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link several billion devices worldwide. It is an international network of
networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government packet switched
networks, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The
Internet carries an extensive range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked
hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), the infrastructure to support
email, and peer-to-peer networks for file sharing and telephony.

TCP/IP
One thing which is worth taking note is that the interaction between two computers
over the network through TCP/IP protocol suite takes place in the form of a client
server architecture. Client requests for a service while the server processes the
request for client.
Now, since we have discussed the underlying layers which help that data flow from
host to target over a network. Lets take a very simple example to make the concept
more clear.

As seen in the above figure, the information flows downward through each layer on
the host machine. At the first layer, since http protocol is being used, so an HTTP
request is formed and sent to the transport layer.
Here the protocol TCP assigns some more information(like sequence number, source
port number, destination port number etc) to the data coming from upper layer so

that the communication remains reliable i.e, a track of sent data and received data
could be maintained.
At the next lower layer, IP adds its own information over the data coming from
transport layer. This information would help in packet travelling over the network.
Lastly, the data link layer makes sure that the data transfer to/from the physical
media is done properly. Here again the communication done at the data link layer
can be reliable or unreliable.
This information travels on the physical media (like Ethernet) and reaches the target
machine.
Now, at the target machine (which in our case is the machine at which the website
is hosted) the same series of interactions happen, but in reverse order.
The packet is first received at the data link layer. At this layer the information (that
was stuffed by the data link layer protocol of the host machine) is read and rest of
the data is passed to the upper layer.
Similarly at the Network layer, the information set by the Network layer protocol of
host machine is read and rest of the information is passed on the next upper layer.
Same happens at the transport layer and finally the HTTP request sent by the host
application(our browser) is received by the target application(Website server).
One would wonder what happens when information particular to each layer is read
by the corresponding protocols at target machine or why is it required? Well, lets
understand this by an example of TCP protocol present at transport layer. At the
host machine this protocol adds information like sequence number to each packet
sent by this layer.
At the target machine, when packet reaches at this layer, the TCP at this layer
makes note of the sequence number of the packet and sends an acknowledgement
(which is received seq number + 1).
Now, if the host TCP does not receive the acknowledgement within some specified
time, it re sends the same packet. So this way TCP makes sure that no packet gets
lost. So we see that protocol at every layer reads the information set by its
counterpart to achieve the functionality of the layer it represents.