Introduction
At present, 1 Gb/s downstream Internet access services are offered by some service providers in the United States, Europe, and Asia even though the number of fiber subscribers (12.4, 22, and 93 million, respectively), fiber market maturity, and penetration rate (10, 10–50, and 45–70 percent, respectively) are very different across the continents [1]. This 1 Gb/s service is being offered as a peak data rate with different levels of guarantee in addition to a minimum multi-megabit-per-second committed information rate. While basic services may not require such a high rate, other factors like user experience enhancement, the increasing amount of connected devices at home, and low latency requirements for interactive gaming and other coming applications (UHD 3D immersive gaming and video conferencing, cloud computing, infrastructure as a service, etc) are expected to boost the demand for symmetric 1 Gb/s access capacity with certain quality of service (QoS) guarantees in the near future.