April 25, 2025, Compared with CPO and AI, in fact, the editor himself is more concerned about the development of the fiber access network. After all, this market has a larger scale. According to Dell'Oro's data, the global market for PON equipment will reach $12.9 billion by 2028. In the SC485 course, Dr. Wei Junshan from Verizon lectured on the development in the field of advanced access networks.
When it comes to advanced access networks, the first thing that comes to everyone's mind may be 50G PON or FTTR? Or WDM PON, coherent PON? Dr. Wei, who has been involved in the formulation of access network standards, told the students that the ITU has been researching the next-generation higher-speed PON (G.sup.VHSP) since October 2022. Its goal is to achieve a minimum transmission capacity of 100Gbps or 200Gbps for both upstream and downstream, a distance of 20 kilometers, a bandwidth of at least 5Gbps per single ONU, an optical path loss (OPL) of 32dB. In addition, it may also need to support fiber optic sensing applications. The deadline for achieving this goal is approximately 2030.
How to support the realization of this goal? Dr. Wei said that many technologies in the current high-speed optical networks will be introduced into the access network. Technologies such as DSP, FEC, and PIC have already been introduced in 50G PON. Technologies such as PAM4, DP-QPSK, and even coherent detection and tunable wavelength laser technology will be introduced in 100G/200G PON. These have all been included in the planning of the FSAN.
In addition to broadband networks, there is another application for access networks, which is wireless x-Haul. In this field, besides bandwidth, low latency is required, and it should be transparent to jitter and protocols. The Verizon company where Dr. Wei works has been providing fixed network broadband services (FWA) using wireless networks. She pointed out that the resources for fiber to the tower are becoming increasingly scarce. With the development of MIMO technology, there will be a greater demand for fiber optics in the future. In the field of wireless applications, many PON devices are used outdoors, so there will be higher requirements for reliability.
In the short course, Dr. Wei also introduced the realization of software-defined PON by introducing SDN/NFV, the autonomous monitoring and management of the access network based on distributed fiber optic sensing, and the sharing of wireless and wired access networks. Many of these contents in the short course are also topics for academic discussions and technical demonstrations at OFC. For example, the team of Dr. Jia Zhensheng from CableLabs discussed coherent PON, and representative articles include:
Single-Laser BiDirectional Coherent PON: A Hybrid SC/DSC Architecture for Flexible and Cost-Efficient Optical Access Networks (M2I.4)
Ognjen Jovanovic from Adtran also introduced their practical 100Gbps burst coherent solution, which supports a link loss of 38dB, in a discussion on the afternoon of April 1st.
In a discussion on high-speed PON standards organized by the ITU in Theater II at the exhibition site on April 2nd, experts from Ericsson, Huawei USA, and Nokia also introduced the standards and applications of high-speed and ultra-high-speed PON, and put forward concepts such as FTTRoom, FTTGrid (power), and FTTIndustry. In the editor's opinion, fiber to the industry should be a new goal pursued by the whole industry.
