Nokia and Bell Canada say that they have successfully tested 25G PON fiber at Bell’s Advanced Technology Lab in Montreal. Nokia claims this is the first successful test in North America.
The trial showed that three iterations of PON technology – GPON, XGS-PON and 25G PON – can work on the same fiber hardware.
“As part of Bell’s purpose to advance how Canadians connect with each other and the world, we embrace next-generation technologies such as 25G PON to ensure we remain at the forefront of broadband innovation,” Stephen Howe, Bell’s Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer said in a press release. “Our successful work with Nokia to deliver the first 25G PON trial in North America will help ensure we maximize the Bell fiber advantage for our customers in the years to come.”
This iteration of fiber technology, 25G PON is being driven by the 25GS-PON Multi-Source Agreement (MSA), group, a consortium of 40 operators and vendors working on standardization. Don Reckles, the Steering Committee Chair of the 25 GS-PON MSA, outlined five key traits of the technology in a previous Telecompetitor post:
- expands the bandwidth of XGS-PON by 2.5x
- has definitive applications and use cases
- is cost effective
- can easily be added to existing networks
- is based on components and technologies that are available now
The 25 GS-PON MSA group identifies use cases for 25GS-PON as large-scale enterprise applications, 5G mobile transport and convergence, and Industry 4.0 – which includes the IoT, AI, machine learning and big data analytics.
