Nokia Demo 100Gbps Full Fibre PON Prototype Outside Lab

Following last year’s successful lab tests, Nokia has brought their future 100G PON (Passive Optical Network) technology to be showcased at the “Fiber Connect” event in Nashville (USA). The new kit is capable of delivering full fibre 100Gbps speeds in downstream on a single PON wavelength in a real-world environment.

The technology we’re talking about is part of what operators use to underpin their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP networks. At present a lot of UK operators are building networks with 2.5Gbps or 10Gbps capable technologies (this capacity is usually shared between multiple properties), and it was only a couple of years ago that Nokia began touting the commercial availability of 25G PON – on the same OLT equipment that is being deployed today for the GPON and XGS-PON standards.

However, the march of optical fibre technology never stops, and Nokia currently expects that the next 50G PON standard kit will be available in the second half of this decade (after 2025). Meanwhile, rapid progress is also being made on the development of the future 100G PON technology, and to see it outside the lab helps to illustrate that.

“Nokia Bell Labs is using advanced Digital Signal Processing (DSP) techniques that will be needed for all technologies beyond 25G PON, including 50G and 100G PON. In an industry first for PON networks, the demonstration also showcases flexible data rates which allows for a more efficient use of the available capacity,” said Nokia.

Stefaan Vanhastel, CTO Nokia Fixed Networks, said:

“Fiber is the ultimate broadband infrastructure. It has almost unlimited capacity with only changes to the electronics at either end needed to increase speed. Today, fiber can already deliver 10G and 25G speeds. 50G will be available in the second half of this decade. With this proof-of-concept demo, we show that 100G is already within reach; all with the fiber network infrastructure that is being built today.”

We should point out that very early prototypes of 100G PON technology have been seen before, such as in 2017 via BT’s experiment with equipment from Huawei. But there’s often a long road between highly experimental lab tests and turning that into a commercially viable product that can work, cost effectively, over existing real-world infrastructure and environments (i.e. it can be deployed without disrupting existing services).

BT’s extremely early experiment required four PON wavelengths using the Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) technique (i.e. 4 x 25G data channels) and ran over a short 10km long feeder fibre. By comparison, the now much more mature kit showcased by Nokia is able to achieve the top speed (at least on downstream) over a single PON wavelength, while also mimicking real-world conditions including fibre distances and power split.

Nokia is a key strategic supplier to a number of UK operators, although Openreach (BT) are probably one of their biggest clients. Openreach has already tested Nokia’s commercial 25G PON technology (here) and they’ll no doubt follow that with similar tests of 50G PON and 100G PON in the future, as development progresses.