Copper Access Networks for Wireline and Wireless Services

In the last few years, technologies for broadband delivery over copper have dealt with increased capacity demands by using high frequencies and transmitter coordination, also known as vectoring. At the same time, to provide high capacity mobile broadband, operators have resorted to small cells. The work compiled into this dissertation covers both vectoring in traditional and future wireline services as the use of copper access infrastructure to deploy high capacity small cells.

In the first part of this dissertation, chapters 2 to 5, we investigate issues with vectoring deployment, namely side effects of impedance changes and its consequences for the stability and performance of vectoring bundles.

In the second part of this dissertation, chapters 6 and 7, we investigate the feasibility of using the copper access network infrastructure to offer mobile broadband services via co-deployment of Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) and Long Term Evolution (LTE) equipment. The proposed architecture is based on analog transmission of the radio signal at frequencies adequate to the copper medium.