- Frontier and Nokia demo'd 100G broadband speeds on a stretch of 20-year old fiber in Lewisville, Texas
- Nokia has been helping other operators prep their networks for 50G and 100G PON
- Most consumers won't need these speeds anytime soon, but businesses will require them to support cloud and AI applications
Frontier wants to crank its network capacity up a notch – to 100G PON.
The company announced Thursday it used Nokia’s Lightspan fiber access platform to trial 100G broadband speeds, claiming it’s the first North American operator to do so.
The trial took place in Frontier’s “fiber innovation lab” as well as over 12 kilometers of fiber on a production network in Lewisville, Texas, said a Frontier spokesperson. Notably, that fiber has been in use since 2005.
Frontier’s network currently supports 10G and 25G fiber speeds for homes and businesses. The highest speed tier available for residential customers is symmetrical 5-gig.
The operator patented a technology called a quad band coexistence, which allows Frontier to support “up to four generations of PON (10G, 25G, 50G and 100G) on the same fiber strand,” said Veronica Bloodworth, Frontier EVP and chief network officer.
“As the demand for speed increases, we can support more customers on a single strand of fiber without sacrificing quality,” she told Fierce.
Frontier chose Nokia for the trial because it’s “the only vendor supporting all next generation PON technology options,” said Bloodworth, and Nokia has been “a reliable partner to Frontier over the years.”
The companies conducted 25G PON trials in 2021, and Frontier has tapped Nokia’s tech to upgrade homes to XGS-PON fiber.
Other operators are using Nokia to stay ahead of the curve on PON. Google Fiber earlier this month announced it tested 50G over its live network in Kansas City, also with the help of the vendor’s Lightspan platform. And outside the U.S., Nokia has trialed 100G with Vodafone in Germany and Etisalat in the United Arab Emirates.
Thinking ahead
Nokia expects to see initial 50G deployments in 2025, said Stefaan Vanhastel, VP of marketing and innovation for Nokia’s Fixed Networks. However, 100G is still in the proof-of-concept stage and “will take a few years to productize.”
From a residential broadband perspective, these types of speeds aren’t going to be necessary for most people until “well into the next decade,” aside from a small percentage of “higher-end customers,” said Jeff Heynen, Dell’Oro Group's VP of broadband access and home networking.
Still, these demos have value in showcasing “just what fiber and PON are capable of and the type of lifespan operators are going to get from their networks.”
Businesses, however, will require speeds like 50G and 100G sooner, Heynen noted, "especially in the case of business services where companies are continuing to rely more heavily on cloud-based applications and where AI’s impact on bandwidth requirements is still unknown."
Vanhastel noted Nokia’s Lightspan platform was designed with enough backplane and switching capacity to support 50G and 100G at the same densities.
“It’s all about total system capacity. That total capacity determines how many ports you can support, at what speed,” he said. “For example, our current generation optical line terminal (OLT) supports 16 line cards, with 16 ports each, running at 10Gbps – or with 8 ports at 25G.”
Frontier and other operators are expanding their fiber and PON networks to support business, wholesale “and potentially mobile backhaul applications,” added Heynen.
Prepping the network for 50G and 100G will allow Frontier “to be ready for any technological advancements that come our way,” Bloodworth said.
“These advancements will not only deliver the speeds that our customers need to support in-home services, AI and advanced content needs, but it will also power our enterprise customers and support the growing needs for towers and mobile back haul,” she concluded.