VIEWPOINT
Fiber broadband expertise evolution just isn’t actually about expertise: it’s about enterprise alternative. Successive generations of PON expertise have elevated efficiency ranges, offering the chance for PON to ship unbeatable residential providers and transcend residential broadband into greater ARPU 10G providers for companies, factories, cellular backhaul, good cities, and extra.
Within the UK, for instance, there are greater than 50 altnets constructing fiber networks. Competitors is driving down residential broadband costs to as little as £25 per thirty days in central London. Apparently, Gigabit enterprise providers with an inexpensive stage of service settlement creates 10x extra revenues, at round £270 per thirty days. So, by including solely three enterprise prospects, a service supplier can roughly double their revenue on a PON. Take that service stage as much as 10Gb/s, and ARPU goes past £700 per thirty days.
10G alternatives are right here in the present day and make for an especially compelling ROI for fiber community operators. So, what’s one of the best ways to ship 10G?
Till not too long ago, that velocity might solely be delivered by point-to-point (P2P) fiber. P2P is extra pricey than PON: it requires extra gear, extra actual property, extra fiber cabling, and consumes extra power. P2P can be an overlay community, so operators find yourself operating each PON and P2P, which will increase prices. Therefore, there’s a rising urge for food for converging enterprise providers onto PON networks.
How can this be accomplished efficiently? XGS-PON (10G symmetrical PON) networks have gotten extra broadly deployed, already delivering multi-gigabit connectivity to companies worldwide. However XGS-PON can not attain true 10Gb/s as a result of its capability is proscribed to eight.5Gb/s as a result of normal specified overhead. The excellent news is that XGS-PON can simply run sooner with 25G PON, delivering true 10G speeds and past from the identical {hardware} that’s being deployed in the present day for XGS-PON. And that is already taking place. There are actually 1 million PON traces worldwide able to 25G PON, enabling operators to handle 10G alternatives very effectively, and that quantity is rising quick.
Extra excellent news is that 25G PON may be complemented with 50G PON sooner or later, as a result of the 2 applied sciences can co-exist. This may allow the supply of even greater speeds to extra prospects, however that isn’t fairly the case but.
A completely mature 50G symmetrical resolution prepared for quantity deployments will take many extra years. Not like 25G PON which is a simple evolution from the present options, 50G PON is a expertise leap involving a brand new era of elements that have to mature and attain excessive volumes to turn into cost-effective. As well as, the migration to 50G PON requires the introduction of latest {hardware}, which takes money and time. The primary demonstrations of 50G PON are asymmetrical with 50Gb/s in downstream and 25Gb/s in upstream. Enterprise providers are outlined as symmetric, so asymmetrical 50G PON brings no benefit over 25G PON. And at last, since each symmetrical and asymmetrical 50G PON variants share the identical wavelengths, operators might want to think about swapping all 50G ONTs once they introduce the symmetrical variant. The business has seen this type of problem earlier than with 10G PON, which was one of many causes operators skipped asymmetrical XG-PON and most popular to attend for symmetrical XGS-PON.
So, is it price contemplating 50G PON? Completely! Nevertheless it doesn’t imply you must make laborious choices between 25G PON and 50G PON, as a result of one doesn’t exclude the opposite. Each operator ought to consider if they’ll afford to attend for absolutely mature and deployable symmetric 50G PON, or deal with the actual alternatives in the present day with 25G PON, whereas having an open path to 50G PON sooner or later.
25G PON is essentially the most optimized resolution for 10G period, and right here’s why:
- It’s out there, mature and being deployed in the present day. No want to attend and lose alternatives to rivals.
- It’s simple to introduce. The OLTs and line playing cards in use in the present day for GPON and XGS-PON can even help 25G PON. It’s only a case of plugging within the 25G transceiver.
- There’s enormous capability for 10G enterprise providers and past, with sufficient bandwidth left over for residential broadband and cellular backhaul.
- It’s essentially the most energy environment friendly expertise for the 10G period. 25G PON delivers a 10-fold capability increase over GPON for under a 2.5-fold energy enhance, consuming 0.25 watts per gigabit. 25G PON’s restricted energy consumption permits an ONU to be built-in in an SFP kind issue (aka ONU on stick) for enterprise and cellular transport functions, whereas this isn’t positive for 50G PON.
- Backward compatibility with GPON and XGS-PON and ahead compatibility with 50G PON make for assured migration paths.
- It’s cost-efficient as 25G optics and electronics are mature, with element costs coming down sooner than 10G elements. Since 25G PON is offered on present {hardware}, there may be little or no extra funding to be made.
The business’s expertise with GPON additionally tells us about industrial candy spots. Operators efficiently deploy 1 Gigabit providers on 2.5G GPON networks. This 1:2.5 ratio holds true for 10G enterprise providers on 25G PON.
As ever, the choice on which expertise an operator will undertake comes all the way down to the enterprise case: when does an operator want it, and at what price. With 25G PON providing an instantaneous path into extremely profitable 10G enterprise providers, the return on an funding in 25G PON appears to be like extremely interesting. All the advantages now, whereas leaving an open path to symmetrical 50G PON sooner or later.
Be taught extra about our 25G PON resolution.
This text was written by Ana Pesovic
Ana heads the Fastened Networks Fiber advertising and marketing actions in Nokia. She constructed up in depth worldwide telecom expertise, with positions in gross sales, pre-sales and R&D in Germany, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and India. Ana has a Masters Diploma in Informatics and Laptop Science from the College of Belgrade. As member of the Board of Administrators of the FTTH Council Europe, she’s a robust advocate of Fiber.
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