IEEE standardises 10G EPON for FTTH networks

Stuart Corner
Saturday, 12 September 2009 05:38

IT Industry - Strategy

More than 40 companies and organisations that supported or participated in the Task Force have welcomed ratification of the new standard. They include Alloptic - whose distributor Opticomm has rolled out FTTH in a number of Australian greenfield locations - along with Huawei, NEC, Mitsubishi and Fujitsu.

Neither Alcatel-Lucent nor Ericsson are members. Both are strong supporters of the rival GPON standard which is still some way off being standardised at 10Gig, although Huawei claimed to have a product late last year and Alcatel-Lucent announced this week that it had demonstrated a 10G GPON product.

The new 10G EPON standard supports symmetric and asymmetric line-rate operations. The symmetric option operates at 10Gbps in both the downstream and upstream directions. The asymmetric option, which reflects the fact that IP video services create bandwidth pressure mostly in the downstream direction, uses 10Gbps downstream and 1Gbps upstream.

The standard enables seamless upgrades via the simultaneous operation of 1Gbps and 10Gbps symmetric and asymmetric EPON systems on the same outside plant. This allows operators to introduce 10G-EPON without replacing any existing 1G-EPON customer equipment and minimises the operational impact of upgrading a large, in-service FTTH network. Initial deployments of the 10G-EPON equipment are expected in 2010.

EPON was the dominant FTTH technology until recently but GPON is now rapidly gaining in popularity. In a presentation to the Asia Pacific FTTH Council's conference in Melbourne in May, Roland Montagne, head of broadband practice for research firm iDate said that, in Europe, EPON was still dominant especially in the Nordics & Netherlands, but GPON had been selected for several major projects is now being deployed in Europe: in Spain and especially France where France Telecom had passed 500,00 homes with GPON. In the US GPON technology has been chosen by Verizon for its FTTH rollout to pass several million homes. It was one of the first telcos to commit to large scale GPON rollout in 2006.