Huawei announced that during the first PON industry development workshop held recently in Beijing, a consensus was reached to propose a PON industry development forum to the Broadband Forum (BBF) to support coordination and collaboration among PON standards development organisations including ITU-T/FSAN, IEEE and BBF and thereby enhance industry convergence.
Huawei noted that due to the cost sensitivity of the PON industry, which primarily addresses home broadband access, it was proposed during the workshop that the deployment of next generation PON systems enabling 10 Gbit/s and higher bandwidth will need to take into consideration the external ecosystem spanning transport, Ethernet and data centre networks, Additionally, next generation PON will need to reuse the cost-effective optical/electrical components and technologies deployed commercially at scale.
In addition, it was proposed that to help expand the PON ecosystem, the community should take measures relating to areas such as PON industry development coordination, standard requirement and roadmap management and standardisation coordination and cooperation. Finally, the workshop participants agreed to host future workshops as necessary to enable discussion regarding key technical issues in PON industry development.
Huawei noted that PON is currently the mainstream access technology used by operators for FTTH ultra-broadband deployments. To date, two competing standards have been adopted, the IEEE’s EPON/10 Gbit/s EPON and ITU-T GPON/XG(S)-PON, leading to duplication in types of system and related equipment installed in operators’ networks, resulting in higher network construction and maintenance costs.
In order to promote a converged PON ecosystem, a group of standards development organisations (SDO) has jointly issued a statement on PON convergence, To help expand PON market scale, share industry chain resources and reduce deployment costs and time to market (TTM), and thereby create a sustainable PON ecosystem, the operator and vendor representatives at the workshop called for the convergence of standards for next generation PON.
The recent workshop in Beijing was attended by representatives from standard organisations such as the Broadband Forum (BBF) and Institute of Communication Standards Research (ICSR), operators including China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom, and system and optical module vendors including Huawei, Nokia Shanghai Bell, Accelink, FiberHome, Hisense, Source Photonics and ZTE.
