UK fiber to the home (FTTH) network operator CityFibre says it will make XGS-PON its standard fiber access technology beginning April 2023. Calix and Nokia will supply the XGS-PON technology.
CityFibre says it will use XGS-PON to introduce symmetrical services up to 10 Gbps for its residential and business customers. The technology also will enable the support of more customers on each optical line terminal (OLT) port.
Calix and Nokia are longstanding broadband technology partners for CityFibre. Calix has supplied GPON equipment since 2018 (see "CityFibre to deploy Calix AXOS operating system across FTTP networks"), while Nokia has supported CityFibre’s service aggregation platform since 2016. Calix has already supported an XGS-PON upgrade pilot in alongside LambdaNetworks and Splice Group. CityFibre reports “near perfect optical testing results” as part of the pilot.
Nokia says its XGS-PON supply agreement with CityFibre runs 10 years and includes its Lightspan MF OLT family, XS-010X-Q optical network terminations, and 7220 IXR-D3L IP Aggregation Switch. Equipment shipments of will begin in the fourth quarter of this year. The company points out that it already has collaborated with CityFibre and the University of Glasgow on a trial of 25G PON as well (see "25G PON supports 5G holographic call in University of Glasgow testbed").
“CityFibre is committed to building a Full Fibre network that is ‘Better By Design,’ providing our partners and their customers with the fastest and most reliable services at the best value. By partnering with Calix and Nokia we now have two trusted and market-leading technology vendors underpinning a nationwide 10-Gbps XGS-PON technology deployment program,” commented John Franklin, chief technology and information officer at CityFibre.
“Our parallel deployment of a high-capacity national backbone to carry virtually unlimited traffic alongside this XGS-PON deployment program will deliver a highly efficient and adaptable network for the future. This in turn will enable our ISP partners to offer a differentiated range of services in full confidence that speed and service quality can be maintained as consumer and business bandwidth demand continues to rise,” Franklin concluded.
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