New Alliance Between Nokia And Vodafone

Nokia and Vodafone have joined forces to set a new gigabit fibre broadband record through a successful Passive Optical Network (PON) trial.

PON implements a point-to-multipoint topology, in which a single optical fibre serves multiple endpoints by using unpowered fibre optic splitters to divide the fibre bandwidth among multiple access points.

Nokia’s renowned subsidiary Bell Labs provided its innovations for the trial, including the use of state-of-the-art digital signal processing (DSP) techniques.

Cost-effective and widely-available 25G optics were combined with DSP to achieve incredible speeds of up to 100 gigabits per second on a single wavelength.

Advanced DSP is needed to go beyond 25G but Nokia says – once adopted – the steps to 50G and 100G are “straightforward” and could be commercially available in the second half of the decade.

The trial also marks the world’s first use of flexible rate transmission in a PON network.

Flexible rate transmission groups fiber modems that exhibit similar physical network characteristics (loss or dispersion) to make data transmission more efficient. The result is lower latency while cutting power consumption in half.

The trial took place at Vodafone’s Eschborn lab in Germany last week and achieved speeds of up to 100 gigabits per second on a single wavelength.

“100G PON has 40 times the capacity of today’s GPON networks and 10 times the capacity of XGS-GPON, so it will help us keep ahead of the demand curve,” explains Gavin Young, Vodafone’s Head of Fixed Access Centre of Excellence.