Nokia has announced that, in collaboration with operator Etisalat UAE, (aka etisalat by e&), it has demonstrated the fastest passive optical network (PON) speed in the Middle East and Africa region.
Nokia Bell Lab’s PON proof of concept (PoC) demonstration achieved speeds up to 100 gigabits per second (Gb/s) on a single wavelength – four times faster than the most advanced networks available today.
To achieve 100 Gb/s on a single wavelength, Nokia Bell Labs used what it calls pioneering digital signal processing (DSP) techniques. Once advanced DSP is adopted, the steps to 50G and 100G are straightforward. However, the mass market is still some way off; Nokia says 100G could be commercially available in the 2030s.
The Nokia Bell Labs 100G PON prototype is claimed to be the world’s first application of flexible rate transmission in a PON network.
Flexible rate transmission works by grouping fibre modems (ONUs) that exhibit similar physical network characteristics (for example loss or dispersion) and makes data transmission more efficient. Using flexible rate transmission results in lower latency on a PON and cuts power consumption in half – two essential characteristics for fibre networks that have a rapidly growing role in the massive delivery of fixed and mobile broadband services.
This is another industry first for the partnership. Others include the world’s first single-carrier terabit-per-second field trial, which set an optical transmission capacity record over etisalat by e&’s fibre network in the UAE.
