Verizon announced success with a field trial of Alcatel-Lucent’s variation of XG-PON, also known as 10 Gigabit PON.
Verizon earlier tested XG-PON systems from Motorola and Huawei. The company is testing the various systems in advance of the ITU ratifying XG-PON standards; ratification is expected later this year, Verizon said.
Where the previous XG-PON systems Verizon tested were asymmetrical, the A-L version provides 10 Gbps on both the downstream and the upstream. Verizon tested the A-L system at a customer’s business in Taunton, Mass., using fiber deployed for its FiOS network. It noted that this version provides eight times the upstream throughput of its currently deployed GPON technology.
The test of the A-L XG-PON2 placed an optical network terminal (ONT) at the business customer location; it supported up to 10 single GigE links, as well as one dedicated link capable of delivering the full 10 Gbps symmetric speeds to a single location.
Two PCs, each having a 10 Gbps network interface card, were communicating across the FiOS network between the ONT and the line terminal equipment located in the Verizon switching facility in Taunton.
This test demonstrated an application layer throughput of 9.1 Gbps, upstream and downstream. As part of the test, a 2.3 gigabyte movie took an average of just four seconds to download or upload and save to the computers, Verizon said.
The company pointedly noted that those download and upload speeds are close to 60 times faster than the maximum speeds capable with cable’s DOCSIS 3.0 technology and more than 20,000 times faster than the average cable subscriber would experience.
“As more businesses adopt FiOS, we are expecting new applications to drive our customers’ upstream bandwidth usage on the wireline network,” said Vincent O’Byrne, Verizon’s director of technology. “While the bandwidth demand today is highly asymmetric, applications such as telemedicine, remote file storage and backups, video hosting, remote computing and other cloud-based services, to name a few, will drive up the upstream bandwidth demand over our network.”