Nokia and Elisa conduct live trial of 100G PON in Finland

Nokia and Elisa have today announced the Finnish operator will become the first in Europe to trial 100G PON over its live fiber network, alongside 25G and 50G PON, during an event in Helsinki which was streamed online.

The demonstration is intended to show how different technologies can co-exist on the same fiber and will be enabled by Nokia's Lightspan MF broadband access platform. Nokia has already conducted a similar trial in Australia with NBN, but this was its first 100G PON trial in a live network environment in Europe, according to the companies.

However, 100G PON is not yet available commercially, with operators still rolling out 10G, or XGS PON. According to Nokia's European head of sales and senior vice president for network infrastructure, Matthieu Bourguignon, 100G PON is likely to be commercially available some time around 2030. 

During the event, Elisa and Nokia executives addressed where demand may be coming from, given XGS PON can, according to conventional wisdom, handle even the most digitally demanding of households.

Need for speed

As Elisa's CEO Topi Maner put it, the "need for speed is ever increasing" – as is the demand for data volume. And the company's vice president for network services, Sami Rajamäki, added that networks need to be ready for traffic growth ahead of time, acting as a platform that can respond to evolving customer needs.

Related:Nokia wants to let customers choose from 25G, 50G and 100G PON

Meanwhile, Bourguignon noted that the network needs to be able to respond to peak demand events. Moreover, he said that the partnership is paving the way for future use cases around gaming, virtual reality and even holographs.

On top of that, he highlighted the ongoing discussions around putting some computing power in the network, rather than on a PC. According to Nokia's calculations, he said, "if we wanted to have something like 5,000 megabits of memory in the network, it would require 40 gig of speed in your connection."

AI is also expected to be a major factor in the growing need for capacity, Bourguignon added.

Meanwhile, Joni Oksanan, Elisa's business director for corporate customers, noted that one customer is already receiving 100 Gbit/s speeds, albeit not through access technology, showing there are already signs of demand for 100G PON technology.

When it comes to 100G PON, while nominally it is capable of 100Gbit/s, ethernet and IP packets' overheads mean that the real-life speed is around 82 Gbit/s. 

Pondering 25G PON 

The companies also noted that Elisa is committed to rolling out 25G PON in future. There has been some debate in the industry about this standard, with Nokia being a staunch backer of the technology.  Other vendors like Huawei and Adtran have argued it is an unnecessary step, choosing instead to focus on 50G PON, saying its costs will come down enough by the time there is demand for either to be competitive.

Nokia has seen some uptake of 25G PON already. Last year, Google Fiber was announced as a customer, however it admitted it was aiming to have the technology to respond to demand increases over time and wasn't planning an immediate large-scale rollout. And earlier this year, Nokia has landed a 25G PON deal in Taiwan, supplying broadband provider Homeplus.

It was said during the event that Elisa has already seen demand for 25G PON, coming from both multi-dwelling units and FTTH.

Elisa is using Nokia's Altiplano platform to support its XGS PON network, with Nokia saying it will also allow Elisa to meet a predicted boom in traffic. According to Nokia's Bell Labs division, this will be mainly caused by (you guessed it) AI, which will push traffic to 91 EB a month in Western Europe.

The market Elisa serves is different to the average densely populated European country. During the event, Emil Asp, head of data and future connections at Finnish regulator Traficom, noted that while the country is about the size of Germany, it only has around 7% of its population (around 5.5 million). 

Last year, around 60% of households had access to fiber, Asp added, while availability tends to vary widely from region to region.