NASHVILLE — At this week’s Fiber Connect conference one of the hot topics was supply-chain issues related to fiber equipment. That equipment includes the fiber optics; the resin cables that surround the fiber optics; and the necessary electronics.
Gary Bolton, president of the Fiber Broadband Association (FBA), said that lead times for service providers to get all the necessary equipment currently take about 52-weeks.
Nokia, perhaps anticipating that supply chain issues would be a big topic at the show, introduced a new fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) kit to assist service providers that are bringing fiber networks to rural areas in the U.S.
The kit includes the equipment and licenses for the operator to deploy a typical 1,000-home community. The kit comes with active equipment for the central office (the optical line terminal - OLT), the device for the home to terminate the fiber (the optical network terminal - ONT) and Wi-Fi units for inside the house. The kits support GPON and XGS-PON over a single port.
The vendor has set aside these FTTH kits for expedited delivery to rural service providers.
Sandy Motley, President of Fixed Networks at Nokia, said in a statement, “We want to support the operators launching in hyper-localized markets but who cannot secure broadband equipment in these difficult times. In addition, we also believe that all service providers need to have one eye on the future, so all the kits can support 25G PON today or when the need arises.”
Nokia’s North America CTO David Eckard spoke with Fierce at the Fiber Connect show. He said Nokia has about 65% to 70% of the U.S. market share in the active electronics parts of fiber networks.
Eckard said the most common PON technology deployed in the U.S. today is GPON. “That’s been the mainstream of the deployments out there,” he said. “We’re seeing last year where XGS-PON is much more cost-effective, and the price is lower than GPON.”
XGS-PON — with the bandwidth of 10G downstream and 10G upstream — is a symmetric version of GPON. Eckard said, “Anybody building currently is going to be XGS.”
But Nokia and its competitors are working on 25G, 50G and 100G technology. And at this week’s show Nokia demonstrated a 100G network prototype.
Nokia’s network-in-a-box kits can be upgraded to 25G PON easily via its technology called Multi-PON-Module (MPM). With MPM operators just plug in the newest technology into a line card in the central office via a device that looks kind of like a USB plug. The MPM is what enables different technologies — GPON, XGSPON and 25G — on the fiber.