The Full Service Access Network (FSAN) Group and the Broadband Forum recently hosted an XGS-PON Interop Plugfest at Laboratoire des Applications Numériques' (LAN's) Digital Applications Laboratory in Tauxigny, France. LAN, a subsidiary of the HF Company Group, operates a third-party testing laboratory at the site.
Representatives from Huawei, Nokia, ZTE, ADTRAN, Broadcom, Calix, Econet, MT2, and Sagemcom participated in the plugfest event.
"This Plugfest was one of our most successful events, involving the best of PON expertise from leading OLT, ONU, chipset, and test tools manufacturers,” said Thierry Doligez, director of LAN. "During this very intensive week of tests, we observed significant positive results on interoperability between participants' solutions, which confirms the dynamism and the potential of this new XGS-PON technology."
FSAN is an industry group that often acts as an incubator for PON standards within the BPON/GPON family, including XGS-PON (see, for example, "FSAN unveils future PON standards roadmap"). XGS-PON, recently ratified by the ITU-T as Recommendation G.9807.1, supports symmetrical 10-Gbps optical transmission per fiber. It has supplanted NG-PON1, which only supports 10 Gbps downstream (its upstream capacity is 2.5 Gbps), as a technology of interest among service providers.
The Broadband Forum, meanwhile, has been active in promoting PON interoperability via such efforts as its G-PON and XG-PON ONU Certification program.
"We're really pleased with the success of the Plugfest, in particular the number of engineers [more than 30] in attendance from an impressive breadth of companies," said Robin Mersh, Broadband Forum CEO. "As networks converge and technologies become increasingly dependent on each other to deliver a high-quality service, interoperability is essential. Working with LAN and FSAN on events such as the Plugfest is absolutely crucial to the Broadband Forum as we continue to look at the next generation of fiber access and build upon the success of our G-PON BBF.247 Certification program."
FSAN members appear to be happy with what they observed as well. "Orange is very pleased that the industry has been able to provide implementations in such a short time frame between the start of the standardization and the first Plugfest,” said Philippe Lucas, senior vice president, strategy, architecture and standardization at France-based Tier 1 service provider Orange, by way of example. "XGS-PON offers an evolution path within the PON infrastructure and covers a number of anticipated use cases beyond GPON. Interoperability Plugfests are considered a major achievement in assessing technology maturity, and that helps to bring confidence to operators before they consider any significant deployments."
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