With the advances in optical technology, the span of a broadband access network using Passive Optical Network (PON) technology can be increased from today's standard of 20 km to 100 km or higher, and thereby serve a lot more users. Such an extended-reach PON is known as SuperPON in the literature, and we call it a Long-Reach PON (LR-PON). A major challenge in LR-PON is that the propagation delay (for data as well as control signals) between the telecom central office (CO) and the end user is increased by a very significant amount. Now, traditional PON algorithms for scheduling the upstream transmission, such as dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA) algorithms, may not be sufficient; actually, they may lead to degraded performance because of the long delay of the CO-toUsers "control loop." This challenge motivates us to propose and study a multi-thread polling algorithm to effectively and fairly distribute the upstream bandwidth dynamically. This algorithm exploits the benefits of having multiple polling processes running simultaneously and enabling users to send bandwidth requests before receiving acknowledgement from the CO. We compare the proposed algorithm with traditional DBA, and show its advantage on average packet delay. We then analyze and optimize key parameters of the algorithm, such as initiating and tuning multiple threads, inter-thread scheduling, and fairness among users. Numerical results demonstrate the algorithm's advantage to decrease the average packet delay and improve network throughput under varying offered loads.Index Terms-Broadband access network, long-reach PON (LR-PON), multi-thread polling, simulation and modeling.

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Facility‐based competition (FBC) in the telecommunications market is considered to have lower static efficiency in the short term and higher dynamic efficiency in the long term. Under service‐based competition (SBC), the entrant can reduce its setup costs by leasing network facilities from the incumbent, which makes the entrant viable, pushes the market price down and promotes static efficiency. This paper attempts to measure static efficiency by comparing the profits of the incumbent and entrant in terms of consumer surplus and social welfare under each competition type by extending the Stackelberg model. The results, assuming a linear demand function and variation in regulatory level, show that FBC results in higher social welfare than SBC on the whole. However, SBC accompanied by strong regulation is also shown to have the potential to be superior over FBC. It is also revealed that FBC exhibits a higher producer surplus (particularly, the incumbent's producer surplus) and is, therefore, more desirable in terms of dynamic efficiency. When the entrant's cost is high in FBC, social welfare is shown to be lowered, implying that cost competitiveness is a necessary condition for social welfare.