Point-to-point (PTP or P2P) wireless technology has grown exponentially over recent years, giving businesses a viable solution to multiple locations without sacrificing speeds and paying excessive money that comes with laying land lines. There is no need to pay expensive leased line charges between buildings, or put up with the slow speeds associated with leased lines. You can receive blistering speeds with minimal operating costs and ensure that your network is not the slowest link in your company's performance. A P2P wireless network can add capacity to any network and provide an inherently flexible and scalable alternative to expensive fiber or low data rate leased lines and can be installed in a fraction of the time.
P2P has primarily found favor in business and low density residential FTTH deployments. However, the arrival of 10G next-generation technologies presents operators with new opportunities for better services, reducing costs or creating new revenue streams. Operators deploying a PON network or upgrading their legacy residential copper networks can benefit from using P2P as a complementary technology. We shall explore some of these opportunities in this article.
Key features of Point to Point Network
Pre-aggregation
Many fixed network operators are pursuing deep fiber strategies, bringing fiber closer to end-users to provide higher bandwidth and premium services. This means deploying increasing numbers of small nodes supporting, for example, G.fast, VDSL2 vectoring, DOCSIS 3.1 or even small fiber nodes. These nodes must be backhauled and aggregated with sufficient capacity so as not to compromise the quality of service. Nodes do not have to be connected directly to service routers, but can instead be pre-aggregated by existing access equipment in the field. It is more cost-efficient to pre-aggregate traffic from a large number of small remote nodes before bringing it to the network routers. The choice of backhaul technology is a question of bandwidth and cost.
Business services
P2P business services are mainly deployed for large organizations or business parks that demand high bandwidth, resilience and service availability. Although PON has features that enable high reliability, P2P goes further in guaranteeing resilience, albeit at a higher cost due to increased floor space in the central office and additional fiber connections. However, most commercial customers can be served either through PON or P2P. Fixed operators who deploy PON networks in residential neighborhoods should consider offering services to small and medium businesses located in the same area. Our analyses show that adding business services on the existing residential PON network can increase the return on investment (ROI) by 15% and accelerate network monetization.
Connecting Remote Locations
The security implications of P2P is of paramount importance when your office branches and data centers are situated at some distance from each other, P2P fiber networks allow them to nonetheless communicate on a secure connection, without your data passing through public peering points or any central hub. Because P2P simply circumvents those potential security risks, using this type of connection also keeps traffic from other users from slowing things down. After all, with P2P, there are no users other than those you want to connect. Your P2P connection can also run at the same speeds as a LAN connection, whether your cables and switches can handle 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps or 10Gbps. You can dive into the work without being delayed by connectivity lags. .
How Much Does a Point-to-Point Fiber Network Cost?
In almost all situations, when a company switches technologies, even when the move will improve functioning and save money, the new technology still entails setup costs. In the case of a P2P fiber network, you'll be paying for equipment, the use of the circuit itself and the labor involved in installing the network on your premises. These are the parameters that contribute to pricing more than any others. How much you'll need to spend to get started will depend, of course, on the difficulty of the installation, the complexity and length of the network and the extent to which fiber infrastructure is already in place at your various locations.
