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The recent acceleration in fiber-to-the-home deployment worldwide along with the emerging 5G communications are pressuring network operators to enhance their networks to serve these new deployments. Hence, operators are seeking new high-capacity optical-network architectures, while averting excessive capital and operational expenditures. Filterless optical networks (FONs), by replacing costly wavelength selective switches in switching nodes with passive optical power splitters/combiners, currently represent a prominent candidate for cost-effective optical-network deployment. In this tutorial, we provide an overview of the architecture and the design issues of FONs when deployed in core and in metro networks. We also perform a techno-economic study to quantify the economic benefits of FONs, comparing their cost to that of state-of-the-art filtered optical networks, and we discuss how several networking …