PON
termISP & telecom
Stands for: Passive Optical Network
A fibre access network where one feed is split optically to many homes, with no powered equipment between the exchange and the subscriber.
Passive is the economic argument: splitters need no power, no cooling and no maintenance visit, which is what made fibre to the home affordable. The consequences follow directly - the capacity of one feed is shared among everyone on the split, so contention is a design parameter rather than a fault, and every subscriber's downstream traffic physically reaches every other, which is why encryption on the access link is part of the standard rather than an option.
Also known as: Passive Optical Network, gpon