[Anaheim, the United States, March 23, 2016] Huawei will showcase the 100G PON core technology research results it has made at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference & Exposition and the National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC), which is to be opened on March 20–24, 2016. Huawei will also demonstrate the latest technology prototype. The prototype has been successfully verified against various indicators in the full-service scenario, and delivers excellent performance in ODN reusing and PON system coexistence, which provides significant reference for 100G PON standardization.

With the development of new technologies and applications, such as 4K/8K ultra high definition video, virtual reality (VR)/augmented reality (AR), smart homes, and the Internet of Things (IoT), the global ultra-broadband industry is embracing a new wave of bandwidth acceleration. In the optical access domain, 100G PON standardization is well under way.

The hardest part for the standardization is transmitting high-speed PON signals on a single wavelength. ITU-T has initiated discussion about single-wavelength 25 Gbit/s since December 2014. Research on 802.3ca standards was officially launched at the end of 2015, proposing three levels of target rates, that is, 25G, 50G, and 100G.

The 100G PON standard needs to take into account the coexistence with and smooth upgrade of existing access networks. The 100G PON system uses single-wavelength 25G PON as the mainstream technology for residential users, and provides a bandwidth of 4x25 Gbit/s (100 Gbit/s) to government and enterprise users through wavelength multiplexing. However, to boost the single-wavelength rate from 10 Gbit/s to 25 Gbit/s while achieving coexistence with the incumbent network technologies, a number of technological challenges in single-wavelength 25 Gbit/s transmissions need to be overcome, such as dispersion penalties and non-linear effects. To all these questions, Huawei's 100G PON prototype give a perfect answer.

The 100G PON prototype adopts a modularized scheme and leverages Huawei's new-generation large-capacity OLT MA5800, which features a distributed architecture, to deliver a downstream transmission rate of 100 Gbit/s and an upstream transmission rate of 40 Gbit/s through 4x25 Gbit/s multiplexing. The prototype system includes the industry's first 25G OLT and 25G ONU optical transceivers, supports an upstream power budget and a downstream power budget larger than 33 dB, is compatible with the existing ODN networks, and supports a single-wavelength rate of 25.78125 Gbit/s in downstream and 10.3125 Gbit/s in upstream. The 100G PON prototype has successfully verified the availability of the 25 Gbit/s single-wavelength high-speed technology, dropping no packets after running for a long time at a 30 km distance and a 1:64 split ratio.

The breakthrough with the single-wavelength 25 Gbit/s technology comes from the modulation/demodulation and dispersion compensation technologies innovatively proposed by Huawei's Optical Access Innovation Laboratory based on 40G TWDM PON (time wavelength division multiplexing passive optical network). Huawei has published multiple theses on related technologies at world leading conferences including OFC, ECOC, and ACP. At this year's OFC, Huawei will unveil the latest research results in this domain, including four research theses that cover four differentiated (different modulation modes and signaling processing platforms) single-wavelength 25G PON solutions that meet different link optical power budget requirements to suit customers' diversified demands.

Huawei has been a key technological contributor to 100G EPON standards, with about 30 papers submitted, and has been appointed as the executive secretary of the IEEE 802.3ca working group. Huawei has long been an active participant in the research and standardization of ultra-broadband access technologies, and holds important positions in many industry standard bodies, including ITU-T, IEEE, and BBF, working with partners to foster healthy development of the ultra-broadband industry. As an industry pioneer in the global fixed access domain in the Gigaband era, Huawei presents the SingleFAN solution to build future-proofed networks for customers, and enables gigabit access capabilities over any media (fiber, copper, coaxial) through the unified platform.