Verizon Conducts Field Trial of 10/10 Gbps Broadband

WALTHAM, MA – Verizon successfully completed the world's first field trial of an advanced FTTP technology known as XG-PON2 and capable of delivering a symmetrical 10 Gbps broadband connection.

Conducted at a customer's business in Taunton, Mass., the trial used the same optical fiber that provides that business with its existing FiOS network connection and services and employed a prestandard XG-PON2 technology. The upstream speeds achieved in the test were eight times faster than those provided by the standard GPON technology.

Bandwidth for New Applications
"This trial demonstrates the capacity of Verizon's FiOS network to provide even greater upstream bandwidth capabilities required for adoption on a mass scale of new and emerging residential applications like user-generated video, as well as business services," says Brian Whitton, executive director of technology for Verizon. "High-definition video sharing, 3-D video, video telephony, telemedicine and offsite backups and storage services are just a few of the applications that will take advantage of the expanded capacity Verizon is demonstrating today."

The 10 Gbps signal was transmitted over the FiOS connection that the Taunton business currently uses for its Internet connection and to provide five FiOS TV connections to the business' customers. None of the FiOS TV connections were affected by the trial, and there was no impairment to the business customer's data service as the GPON and XG-PON2 signals were layered over the same fiber for the trial.

The XG-PON2 prototype system was developed by Alcatel-Lucent, which provides a GPON system used by Verizon, and implemented using the same wavelengths that were standardized for an earlier version of the XG-PON technology. The optical network terminal (ONT) unit placed at the business customer location supported up to 10 single GigE links, as well as one dedicated link capable of delivering the full 10 Gbps symmetric speeds to a single location. Two PCs, each with 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 gigabyte 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 gigabyte movie took an average of just four seconds to download or upload and save to the computers. These download and upload speeds are close to 60 times faster than the maximum speeds capable with cable's DOCSIS 3.0 technology and more than 20,000 times faster than the average cable subscriber would experience.

An additional test was done to transfer a 6.9 GB medical image file in 11 seconds, demonstrating the potential time and cost savings available on an XG-PON network as collaborative medical work environments continue to evolve.

Work on the ITU-T standard for the technology, including the wavelength plan, will begin only after the XG-PON1 standards are all ratified, which is expected later this year.

"As more businesses adopt FiOS, we are expecting new applications to drive our customers' upstream bandwidth usage on the wireline network," says 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."