FSAN releases new roadmap for Fibre Access Standards.

December 20, 2016

3 Min Read

A meeting of FSAN (Full Service Access Network) Group, a global forum of over 70 leading telecommunications service providers, testing labs and equipment manufacturers, was held recently in Hangzhou, China. The meeting took place during 14-18 November and included a special session to mark 20 years of FSAN.

Following from the XGS-PON and NG-PON2 systems, that were extensively studied in FSAN, and recently standardised by the ITU-T in Study Group 15, Question 2, the industry is considering the next steps for optical fibre based access systems. During their Hangzhou meeting, the FSAN group discussed many contributions concerning network operator requirements and technology options for such systems.

A roadmap is a key tool for guiding FSAN’s work and an update to the FSAN Standards Roadmap has recently been agreed by the FSAN Operators. FSAN has now publicly released this Roadmap to help guide the wider industry and serve as a stimulus for future standardisation and technology development in the related organizations, such as ITU-T, Broadband Forum, and IEEE. The new PON Standards Roadmap is available from the FSAN website (www.fsan.org).

FSAN’s new PON Standards Roadmap emphasises a smooth evolution from previously standardised, and deployed, PON systems through extensive re-use of the existing fibre infrastructure. System enhancements of most interest to the FSAN Operator group are identified as increased capacity, longer reach, improved availability (reliability), enhanced flexibility and peak service rates beyond 10 Gbps. Key industry trends that are expected to impact PON technology evolution are identified on the Roadmap as Software Defined Networking, Network Function Virtualisation 5th Generation Mobile Systems, Internet of Things, and the Convergence of networks and services.

In addition to supporting the previously deployed PON infrastructure, the PON Standards Roadmap recognises that ODNs (optical distribution networks) using alternative splitting approaches, other than that used extensively to date based on power splitting, may be of growing importance for emerging applications. For example, wavelength based splitters could offer distinct benefits.

In announcing the release of the new Roadmap, Peter Dawes, the Chair of the Next Generation PON Task Group in FSAN Optical Access Network Working Group, said, “After much consideration and discussion, the network operators in FSAN have identified their priorities and timelines for the evolution of fibre access systems. These have been encapsulated in the latest Roadmap and this will be used to guide the work of FSAN over the coming years.”

Frank Effenberger, Rapporteur ITU-T Q2/15, welcomed the new PON Standards Roadmap from FSAN with the following statement, “For 20 years now FSAN has led the development of PON technologies and this new roadmap provides direction for the next 10 years. I look forward to continuing the successful collaboration of FSAN and the ITU-T in defining future PON standards based on this Roadmap from the FSAN Operators. It is hoped that other SDOs will also find this Roadmap a useful guide for their work.”

In addition to the FSAN meeting in Hangzhou, there was a collocated ITU-T Q2/15 interim meeting where technical contributions from FSAN members towards future PON standards were presented.

Full Service Access Network (FSAN)

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