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Most emerging communications providers have decided to deploy multi-gigabit, service-capable XGS-PON technology to light up their fiber optic distribution networks. However, many incumbent network operators leverage XGS-PON with a hybrid approach. This allows them to maximize their decade(s) old GPON networks and only migrate these networks to XGS-PON when necessary, whether due to network capacity or competitive concerns. Following XGS-PON comes 50G PON. While it provides another deployment option, when will we see these solutions become available?

The Metaverse and the fourth industrial revolution

50G PON services, once fully productized and commercialized, will be supported by a robust component and system supplier ecosystem. This will allow the optical networks being built out today to support the expansion of Nx10 Gbps and 25 Gbps services. This will also accelerate the convergence of residential broadband and smart city applications with SLA-based enterprise and 5G mobile base station connectivity. This will also serve as the foundation for dozens of emerging applications and hundreds of augmented and extended reality and industry 4.0 use cases. Keep reading for a quick review of the recent quarterly meeting of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) standardization sector.

ITU-T PON standards update

Most of the world’s largest service providers and PON solution suppliers met in person in Geneva on September 23-29 as part of the ITU-T Study Group 15 Question 2 (PON). Here are some of the highlights from the meeting:   

• Greater PON network flexibility and utility will be standard
  Triple coexistence details were agreed to, supporting all three ITU PON technologies simultaneously on a single ODN: 50G PON, XGS-PON, and GPON. A third upstream wavelength band (1284-1288nm) will now be part of the 50G PON standard. 50G P

Since Adtran pioneered XGS-PON, there has been an ongoing industry debate regarding when and where a FTTH network operator should employ fiber broadband services using GPON versus XGS-PON standards. The availability of Combo PON capabilities built into second-generation XGS-PON solutions concludes the debate, as an operator can now leverage both FTTH standards without sacrificing in terms of cost or capability.

As first-generation XGS-PON solution costs have fallen over the last couple of years, XGS-PON electronics have leveled off at about 20 to 30 percent more that 15-year-old GPON electronics. When comparing the entire FTTH network build-out that comes out to only two-to-three percent more capital per home to support the increased capability of symmetrical multi-gigabit PON services. Due to this, almost all greenfield networks today are being built using XGS-PON. Where service providers may balk at the need to deviate from tried-and-true GPON technology are those smaller brownfield GPON networks that demand neither the added network capacity nor the multigigabit service differentiation offered by XGS-PON.

First-generation XGS-PON provided the ability to simultaneously overlay, on the original GPON-powered fiber network, a much higher-capacity FTTH technology. If free space is available within the FTTH platform, CO rack, or cabinet, a new XGS-PON FTTH module and the required external coexistence module could be installed with little consequence, save for the optical budget impact of external coexistence module. More on that later. This XGS-PON overlay would enable the FTTH operator to offer differentiated multigigabit services and considerably increase the network’s capacity to deliver 100Mbps and gigabit services.

The pressure on service providers to grow revenue, margins, and shareholder value is at an all-time high. In countries such as Australia, where the federal government assumes the role of a national Layer 2 wholesale network, there are over 140 Registered Service Providers (RSPs) in the market, all of which are battling it out for a share of broadband revenue.

Even though these RSPs have access to the same wholesale input supply costs for the Layer 2 access network, many of these companies are still grappling with the challenges of acquiring more customers and maintaining sustainable margins across their customer base. With innovations in the broadband technology space now able to deliver capacities in excess of what most customers can consume, a business model rethink may be required.

So how are service providers dealing with the challenges of growing revenues and improving margins across their broadband consumer base, given that broadband commoditisation is occurring across the globe?

Before addressing this question, let’s take a moment to reflect on where we are today – here in my backyard of Australia!

Since the first deployments by the nbn in 2011 right up until today, we continue to see the robust debate around the nbn, and its wholesale input cost models, with many of the service providers in the region attributing their margin squeeze squarely to the nbn wholesale input costs alone. However, if we start peeling back the layers and analyse the root cause of this margin squeeze, we quickly realize that our industry has actively been engaged in a “race to the bottom” on price in an effort to try and attract consumers to the respective RSPs services.

This race to the bottom results from the fact that many service providers are still constrained by a traditional “triple-play” bundle model. With the diminishing returns of traditional voice and video revenue, many service providers are left with nothing more than a “single-pla

Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) subscriber connection costs and capabilities have evolved considerably in the last 15 years. Fiber installation techniques such as micro trenching and public-private partnerships leveraging existing right of ways and improved regulatory policies have all helped to reduce FTTH construction costs. Innovations in fiber optics and improvements in fiber connection and distribution methods have reduced the cost to connect an FTTH subscriber from several thousands of dollars per home to as low as a few hundred dollars today. Passive Optical Network (PON) technology innovation, Moore’s Law, and economies of scale have greatly increased capabilities while at the same time reducing the cost of an FTTH connection. The days of $500 ONTs and optics connected to expensive two-port OLTs have given way to $50 ONTs and high-density 16-port OLTs. Fiber access nodes have evolved from supporting dozens of 30Mbps residential services to supporting thousands of 100Mbps and Gigabit residential and business services – all on a single access node. It should be noted that this decade worth of increased FTTH service differentiation or utility has all occurred using Gigabit PON (GPON) and Ethernet PON (EPON) technology paired with innovations in the cost and scale of Ethernet switching, electronics packaging, and pluggable or integrated fiber optics. So how much further can we improve the business case for fiber and how will that occur? Will additional small steps in ONT cost improvement or higher density OLTs be enough to persuade broadband service providers operating within broadband underserved areas to deploy more FTTH or will a bigger step in innovation be required to spur further investment?

10x more in 10 years
Conservatively spe

Extinction awaits those who cannot rapidly get on top of their energy consumption

During the COVID-19 pandemic, societies across the globe bore witness to tremendous reductions in pollution and greenhouse gas emissions when the daily trudge in and out of our cities and industrial parks was replaced by working from home. For the first time, mountain ranges emerged through the veils of smog that had cloaked them from surrounding cities for decades.

This precious glimpse of what our world could be like if we could reduce and control our emissions was afforded by modern broadband networks. In fact, these networks served as the fabric that held societies together over the last 24 months. As a result, governments around the globe have recognised the importance of broadband in their broader fight to reverse the damage of the last 100 years and provide a path toward a viable future for all.

While broadband networks themselves will be a foundational enabler for many government environmental strategies, the broadband industry has a major role to play in reducing its environmental impact. This comes against a backdrop where bandwidth demands continue to increase from market competition, as do the consumption patterns of consumers as their communications and entertainment mediums steadily transition to over-the-top (OTT) delivery with ever-increasing fidelity. The half a Terabyte per month average download threshold has now been breached, and over 20% of subscribers exceed a Terabyte of downloads every month.

With increasing flexibility, reach, control, and choice, along with lower content distribution costs, we must not anticipate any deviation toward complete OTT delivery of every communications medium in the future. Recent announcements by European satellite and cable content providers like Sky and

The home has become the hub from which your subscribers collectively live, work, play, and learn - virtually. The demands upon the hyper-connected homes continuously grow because of the demand for 4K streaming, online learning, remote working, and cloud gaming across various devices. This is compounded by multiple family members accessing the network simultaneously with numerous devices. According to a recent Plume Insights report, U.S. households are now averaging over 21 connected devices. This has driven the need for higher-bandwidth residential services. According to OpenVault’s Q4’21 Broadband Insights report, gigabit subscriptions were up 44% in 2021 and now constitute 12% of all subscribers. Fiber providers are raising the bar with multi-gigabit residential services via 10-gigabit-capable XGS-PON technology.

Addressing the Bandwidth Bottleneck

However, deploying fiber and multi-gigabit services is not the only solution. The bandwidth bottleneck is now shifting to the in-home Wi-Fi network. Subscribers now equate Wi-Fi with the Internet, and extending the gigabit experience from the access network into the home is critical for your success.

So, which Wi-Fi technology offers the best blend of coverage and device support? What about mesh Wi-Fi? What tools do you need to manage and optimize the Wi-Fi experience? How do you empower your customer service representatives (CSRs) with insight to speed issue resolution and avoid truck rolls?

The five keys to delivering next-level, in-home Wi-Fi experiences and gaining passionately loyal customers are:

1. Start with Wi-Fi 6

Wi-Fi 6 or 802.11ax is the latest generation of Wi-Fi technology. With support for wider 160 MHz channels, and up to 8x8 Multi-User Multiple Input Multiple Output (MU-MIMO), Wi-Fi 6 delivers more than four times higher throughput and supports eight times more simultaneous connections, making it ideal for the multi-device, mul

In a market now inundated with data-hungry social media platforms, whether you are an Internet service provider, network wholesaler, or mobile service operator, the industry continues to grapple with the challenge of growing revenue and margins across its broadband consumer base. Finding the right balance between network investments and the average revenue generated per end-user has been difficult for most organisations due to the forever-moving target of data growth and consumption.

We are observing an unprecedented need for speed from end-users globally, with the year 2021 setting data usage records spurred on partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic but predominantly driven by society's insatiable appetite for streaming services. Setting the benchmark for the rest of the world, we saw the average weighted broadband consumption in the North American market surpass 512 GB for the first time, with many network operators now scrambling to keep pace with the growing demand. To complicate matters further, network operators must plan to deliver strategies that will combat the expected tsunami in data utilisation from the next evolution of the internet - the Metaverse!

So, what is the Metaverse, and when will it arrive?

This may surprise some, but the transition to this new world known as the Metaverse has already begun. To back this up, we are already seeing massive investment dollars being piled into initiatives spawning from the "Metaverse," with the likes of Facebook changing its name to Meta as part of its investment into the next digital frontier - The Metaverse! The Metaverse is the next generation of internet and centres around how the user will experience the internet of the future – Web 3.0. It is a concept of delivering a persistent, online, 3D universe that combines multiple different virtual spaces. So advanced are some metaverse industries that people are already calling this transition "the future iteration of the i

Today, we see the benefit of the accelerating deployment of Fiber-to-the-Home. Gigabit services are rapidly becoming available to more subscribers. Increasingly, these high-capacity services are priced within the normal elastic spend of households for their broadband services. This has favorably impacted service adoption rates, especially over the last two years, where a substantial percentage of the population has been working from home. Faster broadband speeds have been essential in the residential market for the consumption of services for leisure, education, and teleworking, where video conferencing and remote collaboration have become part of everyday life across the globe.

With cost-effective, 10G-capable XGS-PON technology reaching widespread adoption among all types and sizes of broadband service providers, the available speed and capacity have enabled those service providers to offer attractively-priced multi-gigabit services. Marketers are quickly pushing the envelope with service offerings beyond 1 Gbps to differentiate themselves from their competitors. From the United States to Italy, France, and the United Kingdom, XGS-PON enabled, multi-gigabit service offerings are resetting the broadband value point across the developed world's markets in France.

As discussed in previous CTO Insights blogs, these new 10G PON-based offerings are helping to accelerate the market’s abandonment of gigabit limited point-to-point FTTH technologies. Additionally, they are calling into question the role of GPON as a technology with which to light new fiber networks. When services of 5 Gbps and more are available for less than €20 in the European market, it is difficult to successfully argue for new fiber deployments with these legacy FTTH technologies when most new entrant FTTH operators are lev

Adtran discusses how Italy’s Digitization Investment project alongside its Connectivity Voucher Scheme fits in with the Open Disaggregated model of invest as you grow which will allow operators of all sizes to launch gigabit services in any part of Italy be it rural or cities without over investing.

The ultimate goal is to create an interconnected and digitized country, in which private users can take advantage of essential and innovative services, businesses can improve their sustainable productivity and have the opportunity to innovate continuously, and in which society itself can benefit from tools to improve the well-being of all its components.

To achieve this vision, it is necessary to create the conditions for adapting infrastructures throughout the national territory, promoting in particular the laying of the fiber as close as possible to fixed and mobile users; but it is also necessary to continuously stimulate the demand for digital goods and services (market pull), among citizens and businesses.

The latest initiative of the Ministry for Economic Development (MISE), managed by Infratel Italia and active since 1 March last, fits into this context: the connectivity voucher for businesses, dedicated to encouraging the digitization of the production sector throughout the national territory.

This is an economic contribution for businesses (micro, small and medium-sized) ranging from € 300 to € 2500, depending on the characteristics of the internet connection chosen. The contribution can be requested and paid directly by operators through their commercial channels. There are two essential prerequisites to be able to request it:

1. The company must make a step change, that is, it must choose a connectivity with higher performance than the current one
2. The company must choose the connectivity with the best performance available at its own premise.

The emphasis is therefore on connectivity perfo