SPLITTER

            Sure you love enjoying a high speed connection at home. Well, today, we want to show you all the important facts related to the splitter, which is considered the most important device of a Passive Optical Network. 

It’s a passive element located along the section that extends between the OLT and the respective ONUs. Its basic functions are multiplexing and demultiplexing the received signals. The signal that accesses via the input port (downlink), comes from the OLT and is divided among the multiple entry ports. The signals accessed from the output ports (uplink), come from the ONUs (or other dividers) and they combine at the entrance.

Splitters can be considered the most important elements of the network, since they offer the possibility of joining or splitting the signals, significantly lowering the cost of both deployment and maintenance of the network, because they are passive components. They only have one drawback, which is the fact that they introduce optical power losses on the communication signals, inherents to their nature. These losses can be easily calculated, as there is a mathematical relationship between them and the number of outputs of the splitter:

Dividers attenuation = 10·log₁₀(1/N), where ‘N’ stands for the number of outputs of the splitter.