Nokia has today announced that the company – in collaboration with Etisalat UAE, branded as etisalat by e& – demonstrated the fastest passive optical network (PON) speed in the Middle East and Africa region. Nokia Bell Lab’s PON proof of concept demonstration achieved speeds up to 100 gigabits per second (Gbit/s) on a single wavelength — four times faster than the most advanced networks available today.
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In the long-standing partnership between both technology leaders, they have achieved multiple industry-firsts, including the world’s first single-carrier terabit-per-second field trial, setting optical transmission capacity record over etisalat by e&’s fiber network in the UAE.
To achieve 100Gbit/s on a single wavelength, Nokia Bell Labs used pioneering digital signal processing (DSP) techniques. Once advanced DSP is adopted, the steps to 50G and 100G are straightforward and 100G could be commercially available in the 2030s.
The Nokia Bell Labs 100G PON prototype is the world’s first application of flexible rate transmission in a PON network. Flexible rate transmission works by grouping fiber modems (ONUs) that exhibit similar physical network characteristics (e.g., loss or dispersion) and makes data transmission more efficient. Using flexible rate transmission results in lower latency on a PON and cuts power consumption in half — two essential characteristics for fiber networks that have a rapidly growing role in the massive delivery of fixed and mobile broadband services.
