Verizon said it has completed a field trial in which it achieved a data rate of just shy of 1 Gbps to a business customer connected to its FiOS network.
This is the latest in a series of Verizon trials designed to test the delivery of greater bandwidth.
The recent field trial was conducted in June in Verizon’s GPON system now in place in Taunton, Mass. The GPON system was developed by Motorola, a current supplier to Verizon of both BPON and GPON equipment.
The company is transitioning from the BPON technology it deployed when it first began rolling out FiOS to GPON, which became commercially available later.
The trial, conducted at an existing FiOS business customer location, was intended to demonstrate in a live network setting that currently deployed FiOS equipment can support higher-bandwidth services and can deliver 1 Gbps without major changes to the network.
The test involved bringing a new fiber connection from an existing operating GPON system at the company’s Taunton call-switching office to a second optical network terminal (ONT) located at the business customer’s facility.
The second ONT was provisioned for the new 1 Gbps service tier, and the speed was tested to a local speed test server over an optimized route, as well as across the public Internet to a regional speed test server located more than 400 miles away.
The throughput speeds were measured at 925 Mbps to a local server and more than 800 Mbps to the regional test speed servers. The customer’s existing FiOS service was left in place and showed no degradation in the voice, data or video services during this trial.
Verizon said that with Gigabit Ethernet, it should be capable of a total throughput of 2.4 Gbps downstream and 1.2 Gbps upstream.
At present, there’s little justification for delivering gigabits’ worth of bandwidth to FiOS customers, but the achievement demonstrates the potential inherent in Verizon’s fiber network, especially with a range of new bandwidth-sucking applications on the horizon, including 3-D TV, desktop virtualization and remote storage, as well as wireless backhaul for the next generation of wireless technologies.
“This trial demonstrated that the current architecture has sufficient headroom to allow for a progressive increase in capacity as needed by our residential and business customers on our current GPON platform and validates our decision to support both residential and business services on the same platform,” said Vincent O’Byrne, director of Verizon’s technology organization, who managed the trial.
