Verizon field trials XG-PON2 from Alcatel-Lucent

Verizon has previously tested XG-PON1 technology from Huawei and Motorola (see “Verizon tests XG PON 10G GPON with Huawei equipment” and “Verizon's second field trial of 10 Gbps XG-PON FTTP affirms FiOS network design”). XG-PON1 supports 10-Gbps transmission in the downstream direction only.

Conducted at a customer's business in Taunton, MA, the XG-PON2 trial used the same optical fiber that provides that business with its existing FiOS network connection and services and employed a pre-standard XG-PON2 technology from Alcatel-Lucent. None of the existing FiOS TV connections were affected by the trial, says Verizon, and there was no impairment to the business customer's data service. This demonstrated the ability to employ both GPON and XG-PON2 signals over the same fiber.

The optical network terminal (ONT) unit placed at the business-customer location supported up to 10 single Gigabit Ethernet links, as well as one dedicated link capable of delivering the full 10-Gbps symmetric speeds to a single location. Two PCs, each having a 10-Gbps network interface card, were communicating across the network between the ONT and the line terminal equipment located in the Verizon switching facility in Taunton.

The team tested the continuous transfer of 2-GB files from 20 concurrent clients using a commercial Web-server application. The files were transferred both upstream and downstream, simulating what a business customer would experience when 20 employees are performing concurrent file transfers to and from remote locations.

This test demonstrated an application layer throughput of 9.1 Gbps, upstream and downstream. As part of the test, a 2.3-GB movie took an average of 4 seconds to download or upload and save to the computers. These download and upload speeds are close to 60X faster than the maximum speeds capable with cable's DOCSIS 3.0 technology and more than twenty thousand times faster than the average cable subscriber would experience, Verizon asserts.

An additional test was done to transfer a 6.9-GB medical image file in 11 seconds.

"As more businesses adopt FiOS, we are expecting new applications to drive our customers' upstream bandwidth usage on the wireline network," said Vincent O'Byrne, Verizon director-technology. "While the bandwidth demand today is highly asymmetric, applications such as telemedicine, remote file storage and backups, video hosting, remote computing, and other cloud-based services, to name a few, will drive up the upstream bandwidth demand over our network.

"We are leveraging the FiOS network capacity and positioning ourselves with the next-generation technology that will best serve our customers' needs in the years to come," O'Byrne said.