June 23, 2010

Verizon Conducts Field Trial of 10 Gbps XG-PON for Residential

Continuing to leverage its fiber-to-the-home network, Verizon has completed a field trial of a second XG-PON fiber-optic distribution system connecting a FiOS customer location with 10 gigabits per second downstream to the home and 2.5 Gbps upstream.
The latest field trial was conducted in May in Taunton, Mass., with a XG-PON system developed by Motorola, a supplier of BPON and GPON optical networking equipment to Verizon.

At the customer's home, the optical network terminal (ONT) received the 10/2.5 Gbps feed and used two data communication ports to simultaneously provide transmission speeds of close to 1 Gbps to each of two PCs inside the home. Combined, the two ports delivered approximately 1.85 Gbps in aggregate bandwidth in each direction.

Tests were designed to simulate what two different customers might experience while using their PCs to download, upload or share files to the Internet when served by a 10G PON system. In addition, speed tests were performed to Verizon's speed test server located more than 400 miles away in Reston, Va., realized speeds of up to 915 Mbps between the PC and the speed test server.

"XG-PON can provide the capacity needed to support the explosive growth in bandwidth envisioned for new and emerging services such as 3DTV and Ultra HD TV, and the growing demand for streaming video content to the PC and TV, as well as the increased use of concurrent applications," said Vincent O'Byrne, director of technology for Verizon's FTTP architecture and design effort, in a statement.


The Verizon technology team plans to continue testing XG-PON with other suppliers in the laboratory and in the network, and also, by year-end, to submit to suppliers a request for information for XG-PON technology.



Alternate Network Link Tried



Verizon's latest groundbreaking field test used Motorola equipment deployed with dual fibers from an OLT (optical line terminal) in a Verizon switching facility to a combiner that coupled the XG-PON system with the existing GPON system. This is an approach covered in the standards. The dual fiber linkage is seen as a way to reduce the overall costs of XG-PON and is under investigation by suppliers and service providers. On the customer-facing side of the network, the test data traveled over a single FiOS fiber link to the customer test location.