Nokia Hails “world’s first” 25Gbps Symmetrical PON Solution

Finnish-technology firm Nokia, which is separately helping to supply Openreach’s rollout of FTTP broadband in the UK, has today heralded their new 25G PON technology as the next step in Passive Optical Network evolution and one that “enables the converging of high-end services on a single fibre infrastructure.”

Nokia says they’re the first vendor of such kit to commercialise an end-to-end solution for 25G PON. As part of that the new solution, which uses their purpose built Quillion chipset, has been designed to work on the company’s existing next-generation PON hardware, such as access nodes and line cards.

“All Nokia customers with 10 Gbps Quillion boards will also have 25 Gbps capabilities in their network. Nokia 25G PON can co-exist with GPON and XGS-PON on the same infrastructure [apparently this requires no changes to the outside plant], allowing CSPs to add 25 Gbps in overlay without disrupting existing customer services,” said the company.

Sandra Motley, President of Fixed Networks at Nokia, said:

“Nokia continues to lead the PON evolution. We have a long history of firsts: from the first volume GPON deployments to the first 10G PON and next-generation access platforms. It is vital that we keep pushing and enable our customers to capitalize on new opportunities while fully leveraging their existing investments. By delivering a step-change increase in fiber broadband networks with our 25G PON solution, CSPs will be able to bring better broadband to consumers and businesses, both through fixed fiber and 5G mobile broadband.”

Openreach recently adopted Nokia, alongside ADTRAN, to be one of their main suppliers for FTTP kit (here). As part of that deal the operator will deploy Nokia’s existing fibre access solutions to new FTTP areas, which includes the 7360 Intelligent Service Access Manager (ISMA) FX, 7362 ISAM DF and the ISAM ONTs (Optical Network Terminals – these are usually found inside your home on the wall).

Nokia told ISPreview.co.uk that Openreach is currently building one of the biggest next generation PON networks in Europe, using their FX platform, which they said means “that in the future they have the possibility to introduce 25G PON when needed.”

The statement above makes that sound like an easy upgrade, but in reality, there would be a lot of changes needed to adopt this, particularly for existing residential FTTP areas (many of these will not be using Nokia’s solutions). Not to mention the issue of Cablelink capacity and cost for ISPs. Nevertheless, Nokia’s new solution is a positive development.

UPDATE 20th Nov 2020

We’ve confirmed that, currently, Openreach have no plans to even trial 25G PON, although they do intend to review their 10Gbps symmetric capable XGSPON platform and will review options around 25G PON at some point. The operator states that, if it wanted to, then they do not see any problems getting in the way of using 25G and higher speeds in their network.