No latency Lastres, Realtime Madrid,
Nokia has announced major boosts to Telefónica España and VodafoneZiggo in the Netherlands. Millions of customers of Telefónica España will be celebrating at the prospect of 20 Gbps of entertainment being delivered along fibre to homes across Spain, after the telco successfully tested a new breakthrough for fibre to the home (FTTH) infrastructure. The telco has been conducting trials of Nokia’s 25G passive optical networks (PON) technology. The concluding trial, the first in Spain to show symmetric speeds of 20 Gbps in action, proved that the 25G PON can co-exist with Telefonica’s existing GPON solution, making the rollout out of services much easier.
Across its business units in Europe Telefónica has around 60 million FTTH homes. It claims that if GPON and XGS-PON can co-exist seamlessly on the same fibre, then the whole of its FTTH is 25G PON’s oyster. In a release Nokia claimed the high speeds and low latency could be used to prepare the world for the Metaverse. However, Gonzalo Garzón, Head of Fixed Access at Telefónica España, had some more practical business cases in mind. Virtual reality and gaming are the apps most likely to grab the available bandwidth, according to Garzón. “New FTTH technologies give us even more opportunities than home connectivity. With their massive uptick in capacity we’ll be able to offer new business services on the same network,” said Garzón.
In gaming terms, the Quillion chipset has played a blinder, according to Bjorn Capens, Nokia Fixed Networks’ European, VP. “This proof of concept with Telefónica has demonstrated that the huge bandwidth-capacity can be easily added to their existing networks, co-existing with their existing PON technologies.” This means customers on the same fibre line can be served with GPON, XGS-PON or 25G GPON, making it much easier for mobile operators to manage their upgrade cycles.
Dependent on the optics chosen, 25G PON supports symmetrical bitrates (25Gb/s in downstream and 25G in upstream) and asymmetrical bitrates (25/10). Though usually located in telecom central offices, Nokia’s high-capacity access nodes are deployed for huge fibre roll-outs. At the start of January Nokia upgraded VodafoneZiggo’s IP interconnect network in The Netherlands, by putting 7750 Service Routers (SR) into 350 sites. It means the 350-location network can pipe terabytes of comms and entertainment services delivered to VodafoneZiggo’s consumer and business customers.
“We can aggregate the traffic from cable, fibre and mobile access services now,” said Leo-Geert van den Berg, Director Fixed Network at VodafoneZiggo, “our IP network can keep base with demand for capacity from the customers.” VodafoneZiggo will handle the next 10 years of traffic growth while cutting the rate of energy consumption, said Rafael de Fermín, Senior Vice President of the Network Infrastructure business in Europe at Nokia. “It’s a real sustainable investment for the future.”