ADTRAN, Inc. (NASDAQ:ADTN) says it has demonstrated wavelength agility without affecting services as well as low latency with its NG-PON2 offering (see "ADTRAN unveils NG-PON2 platform for 10G PON, TWDM PON"). Such capabilities will enable the platform to support anticipated 5G mobile fronthaul and backhaul requirements as well as other "mission critical" applications, the company asserts.
The company notes that the PON technologies currently in use for fiber to the home (FTTH) aren't suitable for services that demand service-level agreements (SLAs). These include upcoming 5G and Internet of Things (IoT) offerings, where latency requirements are expected to exceed the abilities of current PON approaches.
In response, ADTRAN says it has demonstrated non-service-affecting wavelength switching of less than 50 ms on its NG-PON2 OLTs. The company says it has also demonstrated sub-20-µs network latency through NG-PON2, which makes the technology suitable for 5G fronthaul applications. Operators therefore will be able to leverage the economics of PONs and still maintain the resiliency and performance available with point-to-point fiber, ADTRAN says.
The NG-PON2 wavelength agility, meanwhile, will provide the reliability necessary for supporting SLAs for other mission critical applications, the company adds. Such wavelength agility improves network resiliency and real-time elastic capacity, and provides a mechanism to optimize use of available optical wavelengths in the access network, ADTRAN says.
According to CIR's recent report "Current and Future Markets for PON, the Evolution to PON 3.0 Technology 2017-2026" 5G densification has the potential to be a landmark application for NG-PON2, offering an almost $1 billion market opportunity by 2026.
"We expect NG-PON2 shipments to start ramping up in 2019, then nearly double every year for the next couple of years after that," adds Alam Tamboli, Dell'Oro Group senior analyst. "This would be perfect timing to deploy NG-PON2 to backhaul 5G networks as capacity requirements on some 5G networks will be significantly higher than today's 4G networks."
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