Telecommunications

Nokia and Vodafone demonstrate 100-Gbps fiber broadband in new trial

Nokia and Vodafone have demonstrated broadband internet speeds of up to 100 Gbps on a single wavelength
Nokia and Vodafone have demonstrated broadband internet speeds of up to 100 Gbps on a single wavelength

Nokia and Vodafone have completed a trial of a new broadband technology that delivers a blistering 100 gigabits per second (Gbps) on a single wavelength. The trial was conducted using the kinds of network seen in the “last mile” between an ISP and a user, meaning it could eventually be rolled out commercially.

Most of the world is still getting by with internet speeds in the realm of Megabits per second (Mbps), up to a few hundred. If you’re lucky enough to live in one of the US cities that received the limited rollout of Google Fiber, you may have 1 Gbps, while countries like Japan and New Zealand offer access to 10 Gbps.

While those speeds should serve our needs for a while, demand is constantly growing, so the telecoms are of course already thinking further ahead. Infrastructure that uses optics capable of 25 Gbps are closer to market (understandably), and in this latest development, Nokia and Vodafone have shown that these 25G class optics could be fine-tuned to deliver 100 Gbps.

The breakthrough was made using a Passive Optical Network (PON), which is the kind often found servicing the last part of the journey between an ISP and a customer’s home or business. The team managed to squeeze the extra data into a single wavelength, using new digital signal processing (DSP) techniques.

Another technique is called flexible rate transmission, which groups modems (or optical network units, ONUs) together based on having similar characteristics like loss or dispersion. This makes data transmission more efficient, and reduces latency and power consumption.

The team says that this is the first time flexible rate transmission has been used in a PON, and it shows there’s plenty of room to improve the technology already in use.

If the DSP used in this trial were to be adopted widely, the team says that 50 Gbps and 100 Gbps speeds could become commercially available in the second half of this decade.

Source: Nokia

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1 comment
Daishi
There is some new and interesting developments in the space of optical transport on the horizon with 400G-ZR. Usually the optic that plugs into a router doesn't tune or colorize the wavelength for DWDM. You generally need to deploy a dedicated platform next to it to perform that function or take a huge penalty in density buying a much larger specialized optic for the router. The 400G optic designed for DWDM will be the same size and form factor (QSFP-DD) as the normal 400G (FR4) optic. This will allow some of the biggest companies with the most traffic to move off of expensive DWDM systems in the edge of their networks or between data centers and it will be at volume pricing designed for low cost high scale routers. This shift will impact a handful of things. One of those things is places in the network where people use tunable 10G DWDM optics can be migrated to equipment that will support 400G DWDM (leapfrogging 100G). Another area where it will have impact is much of the same technology cab be borrowed for PON. In short a lot of DWDM equipment will transition over to IPoDWDM directly onto the router interfaces.