Nokia and Google Fiber trial 50G PON in US

This trial follows on from the 25G PON deployment GFiber Labs announced with Nokia last year, and the firms say it demonstrates how different PON technologies can be combined on the same fibre.

Nokia says operators are ‘leveraging fibre’ to create new opportunities with 25G PON services and that they have a path to 50G PON upgrades when the need for more speed arises.

Google Fiber was able to simultaneously run 10/25G PON along with 25/50G PON broadband service over its fibre network, and the benefit of this is pitched as providing flexibility and scalability to keep pace with ‘the growing demand for multi-gigabit services in the future.’

“We are always looking for ways to push the capabilities of our fiber network to deliver the best possible experience to our customers,” said Liz Hsu, Senior Director, Product and Billing, at Google Fiber. “This test with Nokia builds on the 25G PON deployment we announced together last year, paving the way for future improvements to our network that enhance customer experience in terms of speed, reliability, innovation and support for future business cases that have yet to be defined.”

Geert Heyninck, vice president of broadband networks at Nokia, added: “Service providers need to be able to select the right technology, based on their needs and business case. It is why we already offer 10G and 25G today, are trailing 50G, and developing 100G - ultimately leading to a full range of PON technologies that can be mixed and matched on the same platform and the same fiber. Our expansive toolkit of fiber solutions allows Google Fiber to future-proof their network and flexibly address their evolving network demands.”

Nokia claims to be the only vendor that ‘can support all next-generation PON options’, with 10G and 25G products available, 50G in trials, and 100G PON ‘as a technology demonstrator’ – which is presumably also a form of technical trial.

In March, Türk Telekom and ZTE carried out their own 50G PON trial in Turkey, which clocked speeds in excess of 50 Gbps in the downstream over a single fibre. It was apparently done so in a way that was compatible with existing PON generations already deployed in Türk Telekom's network.

Meanwhile In April, Australia's NBN demoed Nokia 100G PON tech to reach 83 Gbps on its live full fibre access network, eclipsing the previous trial the October before which achieved symmetrical throughput of 21 Gbps and was a new speed record for PON in Australia at the time.