Ultra-high-speed broadband gained further momentum today with an announcement from Calix that the company will support increased capacity and 10 Gbps connectivity on its popular E-Series broadband access equipment. To enable the capability, based on the ITU/FSAN NG-PON2 standard, customers will install new line cards for the E-Series.
“Demonstrations of both NG-PON2 with tunable TWDM wavelengths and fixed wavelength 10G PON will take place this fall,” said Michael Langlois, Calix senior vice president of systems products, in a press release issued today.
TWDM uses time and wavelength division multiplexing to boost the speeds of fiber-to-the-home infrastructure.
Calix also touted the ability of its previously announced GigaCenter customer premises equipment and Compass cloud-based software to enhance NG-PON2 capabilities. GigaCenter combines the functionality of an optical network terminal, home gateway and high-speed 802.11ac Wi-Fi access point. Using the three offerings together will enable service providers to detect issues such as device bandwidth contention and sub-par Wi-Fi performance “before they manifest themselves to subscribers,” Calix says.
10 Gigabit Broadband Momentum
Although 10 Gbps to the home might seem like overkill at a time when network operators are just beginning to deploy gigabit service, Calix argues in today’s press release that a rise in cloud-connected devices streaming and sharing rich multimedia content will place “enormous pressure” on existing access infrastructure.
Several other FTTH equipment manufacturers – including Adtran and Alcatel-Lucent – also have announced NG-PON2 capability. And an Adtran executive told Telecompetitor several weeks ago that many major network operators have been looking closely at NG-PON2 in the last 12-18 months.
Langlois said Calix made significant contributions to the NG-PON2 standard, including “key submissions that will reduce deployment costs and technical complexity and assure 2.4 [Gbps] GPON coexistence.”
The total bandwidth for an individual NG-PON2 system is 40 Gbps.
The reason Netflix (and others) work towards only supporting 5 megabit speeds is because not everyone has 1 Gigabit speeds. If everyone still had dial-up, services like YouTube and Netflix streaming wouldn't even exist. For the most part, the speed capabilities have to exist first before the services can be built around those speeds. Once we had high speed Internet, streaming video started to proliferate. Imagine what new currently unimaginable services might one day exist once enough places have 1 Gigabit speeds. Google's push for 1 Gigabit is both to "future-proof" the system (instead of just creating the next incremental step), as well as to create the playground for new potential services to play in.
Imagine, for instance, a household where 4 televisions would be streaming 4 different programs in 1080p. And this is something which may not be uncommon in today's standards. Twenty years ago, streaming data anywhere close to this would have been unimaginable and nobody would have thought it would even be necessary for consumers. So, twenty years from now, are we going to wonder why we ever questioned the need for 1 Gigabit Internet? Maybe by that time, 5 Gigabit Internet will be the new goal.