ZTE hosts FSAN/ITU-T joint meeting to advance Next-Gen PON standards

20 December 2017, Shenzhen, China – ZTE Corporation (0763.HK / 000063.SZ), a major international provider of telecommunications, enterprise and consumer technology solutions for the Mobile Internet, held a joint conference for the Full Service Access Networks (FSAN) and ITU-T SG15 Q2 in Shanghai.

Experts and representatives from operators, vendors, and institutions such as the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) attended the event, discussing optical access technologies including single-wavelength 25G, single-wavelength 50G and multi-wavelength access.

The discussions covered topics such as the feasibility and cost of the technologies and the future bandwidth requirements of users. The meeting reached a consensus on formulating a unified protocol-layer standard for PON technologies with speeds higher than 10G so that single-wavelength rates of up to 50G could be delivered to meet different physical-layer requirements.

Representatives of the participating operators also proposed the application scenarios and detailed requirements of adopting PON technologies in 5G services. Specifically, they discussed the network requirements and deployment scenarios when PON was used for services both between RU and DU and between DU and CU. As an important 5G bearer technology, WDM PON was also a major topic for discussion at the conference. Participants thought that it could support 5G fronthaul applications by providing multi-wavelength systems with low latency and high bandwidth.

At the meeting, ZTE also showcased its innovations in the next-generation PON field, including the TITAN optical access platform, which has the industry's largest capacity; single-wavelength 25G and 4-wavelength 100G PON prototypes; as well as a WDM-PON solution based on tunable lasers.

Bei Jinsong, general manager of optical access products at ZTE, said: "ZTE is honored to host this conference. We will continue to drive the formulation and development of next-generation PON standards together with other members of the FSAN, promote interoperability testing among different vendors, and play a central role in the FSAN."

Meanwhile, the chairman of the FSAN and the head of the OAN Working Group showed their appreciation of ZTE’s hosting the meeting and praised the technical proposals submitted by ZTE for greatly boosting the development of the standards.

ZTE has long been at the forefront of the optical access industry in terms of research and contribution. As a major player in the FSAN and ITU, ZTE leads the industry in the number of proposals for FSAN XG(S)-PON and NG-PON2 standards, is the drafter of multiple standards including XG-PON and NG-PON2, and initiated discussions at the FSAN/ITU-T to draft the technical white paper on developing higher-rate PON technologies and employing PON access to undertake 5G services.

Founded in 1995, the FSAN is the most influential standards forum in the FTTH industry. Dedicated to the standardization of optical access network technology, the FSAN has led the completion of standards for equipment such as GPON, XGPON, XG(S)-PON and NG-PON2 and had them approved by the ITU-T.