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LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
What does the future hold when it comes to developments in PON technology? Keely Portway finds out
T
here is no denying the importance of connectivity today. Te pandemic has emphasised how crucial broadband is
to everybody’s daily lives. It is also ensured that fibre and its surrounding technologies have become more widely recognised as the driving force of said connectivity, thanks to the associated bandwidth potential. Today’s fibre networks are based on Gigabit
PON (GPON) technology and the industry is already working towards the next generation of PON technologies for evolutions beyond 10Gb/s in order to meet the ever-growing bandwidth demand and future-proof networks. Te future generations of PON will use a
different route than previous iterations that had their origins in long-haul optical technologies. Te roots of these next generation technologies will lie in data centres, specifically, 100G Ethernet technologies with 25Gb/s channels that are used for intra-data centre connectivity.
“ 26 According to Nokia, this is the ecosystem
that the next generation of PON leverages, and 25Gb/s will be the baseline for the next steps: 25G, 50G and 100G PON. Ed Harstead, lead technology strategist in the Fixed Networks, CTO at Nokia explained: ‘Today, operators en masse are deploying 10G PON, specifically XGS PON as the next generation aſter G PON, and the main use case is for FTTH.’
The reality is that 25G will be a significantly lower cost technology and it’s becoming available now”
Use cases So, is there a need for an even higher speed PON? For Harstead the answer has two sides. ‘For FTTH, 10G PON is going to last for a number of years. But on the other hand, there are other use cases that will be begging for more than 10G PON. Tese fall into two categories. One is transport of 5G backhaul midhaul and fronthaul. So, as 5G networks are deployed more densely, PON architecture becomes more atractive. It also means lots more antennas, and that means the transport has to be much more cost effective. So, PON is a natural fit, and we need more bandwidth than 10Gb/s. Te second category of use cases for beyond 10G PON are for premium services to, for example, business customers or even in the future any end-user that needs a 10Gb/s service. Ironically, you can’t get a 10Gb/s service over 10G PON because all the overheads that are in the 10G PON end up with less than 10Gb/s of actual capacity that you can use for service.’ Tere are currently two higher-speed PON technologies in development in the industry
to address these needs, 25G PON and 50G PON, both of which have their supporters and critics. Interestingly, 50G PON was standardised by ITU and the ITU-T standard, G.9804, has now been released. However, 25G PON was initially effectively blocked in 2020 by 50G PON supporting firms such as Huawei and some of its customers. Because of this, the 25GS-PON MSA Group was formed to promote and accelerate the development of 25G PON technology and it released its own specification based on the IEEE 802.3ca EPON standard with a Transmission Convergence (TC) layer that is an extension of XGS-PON. So, with more bandwidth being the ultimate
aim, and the view from the 50G PON camps that 25G would not sufficiently future proof networks because it is too close to 10G, what are the advantages of 25G PON? ‘More bandwidth is always beter, so obviously you’d think the answer should be 50,’ posed Harstead. ‘But the reality is that 25G will be a significantly lower cost technology and it’s becoming available now, whereas 50G is a technology that’s more for the second half of this decade or later. Tere will be a cost premium associated with it and it only gives you more bandwidth in the downstream. For example, 25G, gives you symmetrical 25, down and 25 up. 50G gives you 50 down, but still only 25 up. For those use cases I mentioned, such as 5G transport, and premium services to enterprises, those are primarily symmetrical bandwidth services. So in reality, 50G has no more symmetrical bandwidth than 25G.’
Fibre Yearbook 2022
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