Network access provider Openreach (BT), working alongside new 50G PON technology from strategic supplier Nokia, has this morning announced that they’ve “successfully tested” the United Kingdom’s “first live” 50Gbps speed broadband connection from a residential property in Ipswich (Suffolk, England).
At present most of Openreach’s existing Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP network, which covers over 17 million UK premises, is still using their old Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) technology – this places limitations on how fast they can go before capacity becomes an issue. GPON supports a capacity on each trunk line of up to 2.5Gbps downstream and 1.24Gbps upstream.
By comparison, many of Openreach’s competitors are already busy deploying 10Gbps capable XGS-PON technology (the ‘X’ stands for 10, the ‘G’ for Gigabits’ and the ‘S’ for symmetric speed), which is a significantly faster, more cost-effective and power efficient technology. But Openreach have since signalled a shift away from GPON by adopting a ComboPON approach (here), which allows them to adopt XGS-PON alongside GPON.
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The first 1Gbps symmetric speed packages using that XGS-PON technology are due to launch around April 2025 in some of Openreach’s contracted rural Project Gigabit areas (here). But the operator always likes to keep one eye on the future and has now tested something many times faster – 50G PON, albeit not at symmetric performance (see below).
Trevor Linney, Director of Network Technology at Openreach, said:
“As the country’s largest full fibre provider, it’s crucial that we continue to research, innovate and evolve our network to meet our customers’ demands for decades to come.
The Full Fibre network we’re building today is a platform for the UK’s economic, social and environmental prosperity, and this test proves we can keep upgrading the speeds and services our customers experience over that network long into the future.
Today we’re deploying XGS-PON ready equipment, and this trial proves we’re ready for the next generational leap, as and when it’s needed.”
Sandy Motley, President Nokia Fixed Networks, said:
“This trial shows the incredible power of fibre to increase network capacity in an efficient way. As a futureproof, energy efficient technology, fibre is used by operators like Openreach to connect everything to multi-gigabit services. Our platform provides them with a full range of PON technologies and services that can be delivered over their existing fibre network. From 10G and 25G today to eventually 50Gbps or even 100G, our unique toolkit of fibre solutions allows Openreach to future-proof their network and flexibly address their evolving network demand.”
During the field test, Nokia’s 50G PON technology achieved astonishing real-world download speeds of 41.9Gbps (Gigabits per second) and upload speeds of 20.6Gbps. Just to be clear, this test was run over a section of Openreach’s existing Full Fibre network, although the exact setup wasn’t stated.
However, it’s debatable whether this really is the UK’s “first live” test of 50G PON, since Netomnia is already believed to have conducted tests of a similar prototype from ADTRAN. But that was a bit more of a lab test and so not quite the same. Nevertheless, Netomnia are still planning to launch their first commercial 50G PON based broadband packages during 2025 (here), while by comparison Openreach have not announced any firm launch plans.
At this point it’s worth remembering that Openreach were boasting about having tested 25G PON technology from Nokia all the way back in 2021 (here), although no such commercial packages using that solution have ever emerged. So as fun as all this is to watch, it doesn’t necessarily reflect the imminent arrival of packages faster than 10Gbps.
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The usual catch in all this is the difficulty of actually being able to harness all that speed when online. Most internet services still seem to struggle to harness more than a few hundred megabits per second, assuming they can do even that, while the 1Gbps+ domain is still a challenge (Why Buying Gigabit Broadband Doesn’t Always Deliver 1Gbps). On the other hand, marketing departments and consumers with deep pockets like big performance numbers, even if they’d struggle to harness all the speed.
Mind you, there was a time when even a 56Kbps dialup connection was considered “fast“. Internet connections and consumer demands are in a constant state of growth and evolution, so there will come a time when even 50Gbps+ speeds might seem positively pedestrian, but that’s still a long way off and Openreach are just ensuring that they’re ready when the time comes.
UPDATE 2:03pm
For those with an interest, here’s what Nokia’s ONT for this looks like in Openreach’s test (obviously it’s not quite the right size to be hung on your walls yet).
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Openreach should be worried about XGS plans. They tested 25Gb BACK IN 2021, but nothing from that. XGS is so old, and all providers have them live, except for Openreach. Will Openreach make XGS plans in areas where it is live?
Openreach has been deploying XGS-ready kit but the priority at the moment is to achieve the coverage targets by the end of 2026.
You claim XGS is old but that is generally the case. Providers will only adopt as the financials become viable – thus the trend to adopt has only picked-up in recent years. BT Martlesham’s efforts around optical fibre started back at the end of the 80s and look how long it took to get that rolling.
Just make symmetric available for all tiers BT, get on with it seeing as you have combo cards for GPON and XGS-PON. XGS-PON or 50G PON I don’t care but peddling legacy GPON even as of today is rubbish as ALTNETS started a few years ago with XGS-PON and symmetric.
Those Alt-Nets are generating more debt than revenue on those deployments. You should be grateful that BT is biding its time until the market is ready.
Always worth remembering that some of the alt-nets, especially CityFibre, still have a massive GPON-only install base.
CF’s XGS-PON upgrade is going MUCH slower than they first suggested it would, with very few updates on the project as a result.
I work from home on an 80/20 connection that isn’t fast enough some of the time, and it’s interesting to think about where I’d be happy, speed-wise. I’ve got wired Ethernet to everything that cares about speed, and I get to the following conclusions:
1. Nothing I do would be appreciably better with 10G to a device rather than 1G – the only reason for me to go faster than 1G is because I can then have more than one device saturate its Ethernet link (e.g. games console downloading a game in parallel to me downloading work stuff).
2. I can come up with reasonable scenarios where I’d want to saturate 3 Ethernet links, and have left-over space for WiFi pushing a few hundred megabits per second house-wide. Beyond that, I’m getting into rare situations that will probably never happen.
I know I’d be willing to pay extra to my current ISP (compared to my current connection) for gigabit speeds. I suspect I’d probably be willing to pay something extra for anything up to 10G symmetric; beyond that, the only use I see for faster PONs is reducing the risk that I’d see congestion.
I’d be perfectly happy with 160M symmetric, but I’m still in a fibre desert, in a city of 130,000. But it looks like Openreach and CityFibre are both building, so one of them might get here in the next year or so. And nope, I’m not going with VM in the meantime!
I used to work from home on 80/20 during early months of pandemics and it was enough for me and my partner who was spending most of the day on video calls. Then we’ve moved our home and started from OFNL 300/300. IMO stable 100/100 is enough, except you are working while your family members are watching multiple 4k streams at the same time.
What “games” could anyone be playing that would saturate a 1Gbps link?
For me, the big problem is vendor SDKs and similar – downloading a multi-gigabyte SDK to see if it’s got what I want in it while sustaining a video call with the vendor is challenging, and embedded hardware vendors are still firmly in the mentality of “everything in a big ISO image”, not nice git repos and the like.
It’d be easier if they broke things out nicely, but it’s often hard enough to convince them to give me a download link rather than having them post me a DVD set. If I were just doing video calls, though 80/20 is plenty for a family of 4.
@Fara82Light
Not playing, downloading. You buy the game on Steam, PS Store, whatever, and you get offered a 20 GiB (or larger, for some games – I’ve seen people reporting AAA games that are 150 GiB) download. And the stores can saturate at least gigabit while transferring content to you.
If one of my kids is downloading a big game while I’m trying to download an SDK, and all that while another kid is watching TV and I’m on a video call, demands get quite high. While everything works (video call, downloads, TV watching etc), the downloads are slower than they would otherwise be – and if I’m waiting for a download to happen, it’s painful.
Not that it was any better in the office, since at least I have 80M between at most 4 people here, rather than 500M shared between 30 people, many of whom were also doing big downloads.
Mark you got a typo here:
“But the operator always likes to keep one eye on the future” [to then ignore the innovation for years and let the competition over take them]
GreenLantern22 – Stop being naughty as BT Ivor will come along and slap your wrists/legs whatever 🙂
The BT fans on here won’t stand for any form of constructive criticism against their beloved BT.
“Constructive”
Plenty of experiments and trials but does anything make it to market? No.
Aside from the losses that are primarily in DSL areas, not much overtaking is going on. GPON still does the job and does it well.
As it needs restating every time it is brought up – Openreach will roll out a newer technology as soon as they need to, which is as soon as their customers (the ISPs, not you or I) ask for it. Until then they’ll roll out cheaper technology, dominate the market, and make piles of money in the process. Which they do, even in alt net areas.
Phahahaha Ivor that simply is just not true….
BT may be the biggest but their reputation is marginally better than that of VM. Cityfibre are far FAR superior and increasing market share constantly. BT have been stagnant for decades, and have been slowly falling behind all that time. Who even uses BT broadband other than employees? More expensive for the same service you can get from any number of OR ISPs, with better customer care and pricing (the thing that really matters most of the time). Like most big British ‘establishments’ they’re failing, despite being handed a huge monopoly that they’ve sat on stagnating.
Why bother upgrading to XGS-PON when next generation tech is already waiting in the wings, especially when the inadequacies of GPON only affect a very small percentage of users anyway. But as BT haters find facts a minor inconvenience I don’t suppose that will make much difference to them anyway. As Taylor Swift would say BT haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate.
And that’s the beauty of ALTNETS BT Ivor, we don’t have to wait centuries for dinosaur BT to decide what they want to get away with an offering. Many areas now have consumer choice which is WHY BT are even doing FTTP anyway having dragged their heels, firstly with ADSL to FTTC and then telling us all that nobody needed faster than FTTC.
GPON isn’t doing the job “well”. It’s doing the job for a number of customers, but many people want the faster upload capability brough about by symmetric speeds as as more sign up for fibre in streets the old congestion issue will rear its head with the legacy deployed GPON model.
It’s time time Ofcom took the restraints off of BT – I do wonder how much they are holding BT back on ‘Competition’ grounds like they back in 1990’s when they killed the BT FTTP plans dead. All the R&D that was done went to other countries.
BT is a leader on the technology, but it has also to complete the roll-out of the fibre network over the next 2 years which it is focusing its funding on. Once that program is completed the funds will be directed to the next set of business initiatives.
Further, this kind of capability in the network will be focused on the business customers not regular consumers.
Don’t tell Jeremy!
🙁 🙁 🙁
I thought Netomnia were due to go live with their 50G PON in 2024, and launch a 40Gbps package. It’s gone quiet since that was announced.
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2024/10/netomnia-update-on-plan-for-50gbps-uk-fttp-network-by-end-of-2024.html
Just slide that ONT right into your rack right?
If openreach want to install that nokia ONT in my switch cabinet it will fit in just perfectly.
As someone with 23 years working with ISP’s MNO’s and BT, I just don’t see the value in PON speeds above 2gb. Residential customers don’t have enough devices to justify 1gb at the best of times. Small business maybe, but the vast majority of SME’s will be using leased line ethernet services already. Don’t get me wrong PON is a great technology for mass coverage connectivity, but until you can provide un contended 5 9’s SLA with a 4 hour response time its difficult to see customers moving away from leased services. The other fundamental issue with the optics is tracing back a genuine fault between the olt and ont is difficult depending on the area and split ratio, and you do find the fault it takes out more than one subscriber.
For typical residential customers, gigabit is justifiable, but faster gets hard. Gigabit means that I minimise the wait when my Playstation, Xbox, or affordable gaming PC downloads a new game, because I’m saturating the link from my router to the gaming machine, and thus I can get playing the game sooner.
Based on my house, that means I want gigabit for a download, plus maybe 50 to 100 Mbit/s surplus for TV watching, video calls etc, in a household of 4 when I didn’t work from home – with my work stuff as well, two simultaneous saturating downloads is possible, so that’s 2 gigabit plus 50 to 100 Mbit/s surplus.
This used to be much lower, because up until about 2012 or so, devices often just had Fast Ethernet, not Gigabit, and WiFi before 802.11ac couldn’t push much more than 400 Mbit/s total in a good domestic setup, less in a typical one.
Beyond that is just “bragging rights”; you’d rarely have more than 2 devices wanting to saturate gigabit at a time, and WiFi in a residential setting isn’t really up to delivering more than about 500 Mbit/s in total if you use 802.11ax, or about 1 Gbit/s in total if you use 802.11be (although 802.11be in the hands of a professional could push to delivering more like 10 Gbit/s in a residential setting, that’s not a reasonable setup to work from).
This analysis could change if 10 GbE or 802.11bn result in a significant increase in what a “normal” consumer could reasonably consume, but at the moment, that looks unlikely – we do seem to be settling out at a point where gigabit is fast enough. Even under that analysis, though, we’re limited to about 100 Gbit/s per device – that’s the point at which consumer NVMe SSDs top out today, and you’re buying specialist I/O devices if you want faster.
Note, too, that there’s a big difference between the average and peak desired speeds. My average usage across a month is on the order of 2 Mbit/s, with lows at under 1 kbit/s, and highs at full line rate. The point at which I stop having any interest in fast speeds is the point at which my highs are below full line rate – and I know that that will be at least 2.1 Gbit/s for the things I do that are within the bounds of “normal consumer” behaviours. In my case, it’ll actually be closer to 3.1 Gbit/s, but that’s because there’s things I do as a nerd working from home that are definitely not normal consumer behaviour.
“WiFi in a residential setting isn’t really up to delivering more than about 500 Mbit/s in total if you use 802.11ax,”
@Simon That’s a bit pessimistic. I have Zens’s new 2.3/2.3 service via CityFibre and was able to download from Steam at 1.7 Gbit/s over 802.11ax on my laptop. This is about 5 metres from the router through a floor.
These speeds are absolute game changers, honestly. I can send files to work’s servers (using my wired in PC) and it takes seconds whereas before with Virgin Media it was 10-15 minutes waiting. Not sure there’s a lot of value _for me_ in 50 Gbit/s over 2.3 Gbit/s – i.e going from sub-10 seconds to sub-1 second (not that work’s servers could even handle it they have 40 Gbit/s connections shared) although if you’re dealing in files measured in tens of GBs and the other end can handle it then it could be worth it.
@john
My experience of 802.11ax in a family home differs massively; with one active device, you can get a good 5 Gbit/s, but speeds fall off surprisingly quickly if someone at long range from the router is actively using data (TikTok, watching football on TV), settling out at around 500 Mbit/s total once the Internet is in use from multiple locations.
That said, the core of my point is that I’m always going to be interested in higher speeds if my Internet link is the bottleneck; until I never saturate my line, faster would be nicer. Sounds like for you, that’s somewhere above 5 Gbit/s.
I think what many are forgetting is while these speeds look excessive now, they wont in 10 years time.
Think about how long ADSL has been kicking around for. When the first connections went live, usage was totally different.
Forget just simple downloads, there are countless streaming/VR uses that these speeds could enable; we just don’t have them yet.
I think, even in 10 years they will look excessive, unless the quality of video streaming goes beyond 8k, which is not even making a dent at the moment. Games may be streaming instead of downloading, but even then it will still excessive and game streaming as far as I know have not really taken off.
While maybe faster home networks may be around in 10 years time, I doubt it will make much difference as many people will still be using Wi-fi and we all know how bad Wi-fi can be. They may come out with something better by then, but I doubt it.,
Don’t forget PON is a shared resource and even though 50G is way in excess of what any individual user would need when multiple users on the same split start to ramp up their usage towards 1G the limitations of GPON and maybe even XGS-PON will start to become apparent.
You can get this service (and have for years) in Switzerland and California for about £25 a month.
Here, BT will launch in 2028. 50Gb down, 128kb up, £128 a month.
Would be more interested if Openreach were testing symmetrical uploads and downloads for residential deployment
They are. Its coming in April in a few weeks time starting with a few groups, then later for everyone else.
Chap is using a Veex tester on Huawei FTTC shelf.
Love that thanks.
I’d do anything for open reach to even give me FTTP right now.
Currently stuck on 40 meg. It’s painful.
Painful for (not) doing what?
amazing
now how about giving us more than 110mbit up?
Starting in April apparently on GPON & XGS-PON
Having had 2000/1000 for nearly a year I couldn’t go back to anything that wasn’t at least a symetrical gig. Hopefully I will never need to. As soon as cityfibre upgrade to XGS-PON here I’ll be ordering as well. At this point it’s very unlikely I’ll go back to Openreach with their current and incoming offerings. Good to see them pushing forward though, finally.
What, exactly was the point of this? Boasting without adding anything to the conversation?….
I wasn’t Boasting, sorry if it came accross that way. I’m sorry you missed my point as well. Thanks for your contribution though.
The ONT port has a solitary “25GE” indicator lit.
Perhaps one must hoist two of those lovely beasts into the rack? /s