Meeting the traffic requirements of residential users in the next decade with current FTTH standards: how much? how long?

Traffic demand in the access has grown in the last years, and service providers need to upgrade their infrastructure to the latest access standards. While fiber has become the preferred technology of choice in access networks, there are many fibre access technologies available in the market. This poses a challenging question to operators not always easy to answer: how to upgrade? what technology and for how long it will cope with the demands? In this paper we model the traffic forecast in the access for the next decade and analyze possible upgrade scenarios of fibre access networks, concluding which of the NG-PON flavors could better fit the demand.