The industry is entering the era of "fiber to everything." Once operators have deployed fiber to the home, their networks will extend to every other building on the street, in addition to homes, meaning they can connect businesses and other services. PON fiber will be able to support high-bandwidth consumer services, Industry 4.0 applications, enterprise connectivity, 5G transport, and smart city services. This creates more revenue opportunities, lowers the total cost of ownership (TCO), and significantly reduces overall energy consumption. This new era of broadband, designated Broadband 6 by the World Broadband Association (WBBA), requires a new technical solution. Nokia's pioneering Lightspan MF-14 is the world's first Gen 6 optical line terminal (OLT) and has already been selected by customers building 25 Gbps networks in Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific.
Geert Heyninck, Vice President of Broadband Networks at Nokia, says: “Fiber to the home is becoming fiber for everything. This is made possible by several technological advancements, most notably higher-speed PON technologies to accommodate all the new services, and SDN to bring more intelligence to the network. When you think about it, the sheer number of connection points across fiber makes it challenging to gain an instant view of everything happening on the network, fully automate network control, and take action without disrupting service. Our current portfolio is doing an excellent job of supporting many of these requirements for today’s and tomorrow’s services, but we are looking to the future. The MF-14 platform will be suitable for operators planning large-scale 25G, 50G, and even 100G PON deployments within the same environment.”
In his recent report*, Erik Keith, principal research analyst for broadband infrastructure at S&P Global, states: “The PON market is at a pivotal moment in network evolution, where fiber broadband means much more than residential connectivity. There is a huge opportunity for service providers to connect everything much more efficiently by leveraging their existing fiber broadband networks. After all, the same fiber cables originally laid in residential areas also run through commercial buildings such as office blocks, hospitals, and government properties. This approach eliminates multiple overlapping networks, minimizes street excavation, and substantially reduces energy consumption. The new Lightspan MF-14 OLT can enable operators to deploy a solution that will last for decades, while providing a platform that can exponentially increase network throughput compared to most networks in use today.”
Based on a new, advanced, disaggregated hardware and software design, the MF-14 represents a generational leap in fiber access solutions. It is the industry's highest-capacity platform and the only solution ready for the mass deployment of 25G, 50G, and 100G PON services. It is also the industry's first OLT with the six-nines availability and sub-millisecond latency required for mission-critical Industry 4.0 and 5G transport services.
Frontier Communications, the first in the United States to test 25G PON, is also the first to evaluate the MF-14 in its live network. Scott Mispagel, SVP of National Architecture and Engineering at Frontier, said, "We are proud to be the first to adopt this next-generation platform. It's another way we can offer customers the fastest broadband available. The MF-14 platform will support our journey to 100G using our existing fiber network and future-proof our network with speeds that will continue to outperform cable and other technologies for generations."
