Altice Labs has put its flag on the NG-PON2 flagpole as it prepares for a 5G world of potentially overwhelming data traffic volumes and disaggregated radio access network architectures.
On the 13th February, at the FTTH Conference 2018 in Valencia, José Salgado, from Altice Labs’ network systems development direction, presented the vision to support 5G services, with an integrated access network deployment strategy which will support residential, business, backhaul and fronthaul service requirements. This is a strategy that can “save deployment costs on access [and promote a] positive business case for fiber” as a 5G facilitator, as well as other important services.
José Salgado noted that “5G will be the most important driver for NG-PON2”, in which operators will have to carry different types of services at different wavelengths. Most operators plan to upgrade existing fiber access networks and believe they will need the full capabilities of the NG-PON2 – a 10 Gbit/s symmetric potential at eight wavelengths – to meet the needs of the most demanding urban deployments of 5G small cells next to business and residential broadband demands.
José Salgado highlighted the benefits of NG-PON2 that other operators, as Verizon has long promoted – can coexist with other PON variants, allowing the reuse of existing optical distribution network elements (ODN); colorless optical network units (ONUs) that can be tuned to any assigned channel and adjustable lasers, the ability to support different services at separate wavelengths – but stressed the applicability of NG-PON2 to fronthaul, the transport link between units of remote radio heads (RRUs) and the baseband unit (BBU) between the optical line terminal (OLT) and the IP / MPLS metro network.
Other variants of PON (XGS-PON and GPON) are capable of supporting backhaul, business and residential services, but 5G fronthaul will need NG-PON2 to enable links (up to) 20 Gbit/s between BBU and RRUs.
This will be in the interest of Verizon and other NG-PON2 enthusiasts as they need as many operators to support the emerging broadband technology as possible to enable economies of scale and make the NG-PON2 accessible for mass deployment.
Altice Labs believes that NG-PON2 will be ready for deployment by 2020, when 5G deployments will begin in earnest. NG-PON2 has many attributes that attract large operators, but the potential cost of deployments has been a major hurdle.