NSN's Coherent PON Technology Ignites Interest

A new approach to passive optical networking, known as Coherent PON, put forward by Nokia Siemens Networks (News - Alert), is creating some buzz, David Russell of broadband access technology vendor Calix noted during the Broadband Workshop on Future Fiber Architectures and Local Deployment Choices event held by the FCC (News - Alert) yesterday.

 

Russell said everyone at an FSAN meeting last week in Asia was excited when NSN discussed the technology. FSAN, or the Full Service Access Network Group, is a consortium of leading telecommunications services providers, independent test labs, and equipment suppliers that help drive standards around broadband. FSAN is best known for its work on gigabit rate G-PON and B-PON passive optical networking.

 

NGN tells TMCnet that Russell was referring to its NGOA, or Next Generation Optical Access, research, which is based on coherent lasers and is designed to provide, compared to GPON, the following benefits:

 

·         100km reach (vs. 20);

·         Splitting factor 1:1000 (vs. 1:64);

·         1GBit/s/subscriber (vs. 30MBit); and

·         1 wavelength per subscriber, allowing any distance of subscriber to NGOA node (with GPON all subscribers in one port should have roughly the same distance to the GPON node due to timing issues).

“Besides the benefit of providing higher bandwidth to the subscribers, it will also allow operators to merge access and metro networks to come to a flatter and consequently less opex-intensive network architecture,” said Ute Ritter of the Communications Broadband Connectivity Solutions business at Nokia Siemens Networks GmbH & Co. KG.

“Currently this is a research project only, product availability is expected (dependent on market and technology development) not earlier than 2012,” Ritter said.