Powered by Nokia's industry-leading equipment, Proximus, a leading fiber operator in Belgium, has deployed the world's first 25G PON in a live fiber network. With the network speed surpassing 20 Gigabits per second, it is now the world's fastest fiber network. 

Guillaume Boutin,
CEO, Proximus

"The activation of the first 25G PON network worldwide shapes our bold ambition to be a trendsetter, to become a reference operator in Europe and, why not, across the globe. Together with Nokia, we have achieved a technological leap forward that will become a key enabler of the digital and economy and society that we stand for," says Guillaume Boutin, CEO Proximus. 

Proximus is already present in more than 500,000 homes, with plans to increase the fiber coverage to 70% of homes and businesses by 2028. 

The use of Nokia's 25G PON solution is crucial to helping Proximus realize its ambition to "build the most future-proof network for Belgium as a catalyst for our economy and innovation. The deployment of fiber and 5G represents a major technological shift that will unleash a new Gigabit society." It is building a high-capacity fiber open network that will be available to all operators.

Proximus Headquarters in Brussels

Optical fiber networks are increasingly becoming crucial to providing high-speed internet connectivity to both consumers and businesses. Globally, it is the fastest-growing access technology and most future-proof. Most of these deployments are based on Gigabit Passive Optical Networks (GPON) technology. 

While Proximus has taken the lead in deploying 25G PON, other operators also realize the growing relevance of this technology. Last year, INEA, one of the biggest wholesale operators in Poland, tested Nokia's 25G PON solution. 

"It is important to explore the new technologies, understand and look for the real-life use cases, because it's called innovation. The results of our 25G PON test clearly show the advantage of fiber over other broadband technologies, including HFC or radio. Importantly, FTTH technology is available commercially here and now," says Michael Barthowiak, CEO, INEA.

Why Do We Need 25G PON?

A key advantage of 25G PON is that it offers massive capacity, allowing CSPs to offer unified services over a single high-performing fiber network. Specifically, it enables several new-age use cases and applications that demand high speed, extremely low latency, and high bandwidth like remote surgery, Industry 4.0, massive-scale virtual reality and real-time digital twins, among others. 

25G PON is a major step in the evolution of PON technology. The solution uses Nokia's existing PON hardware, which is currently being deployed for GPON and XGS-PON, including access nodes and line cards, to allow Communication Service Providers (CSPs) to maximize the usage of the fiber network. Additionally, it does not require any changes to the outside fiber plant. 

Nokia's 25G PON is easy to introduce in the existing network and can co-exist with the existing GPON and XGS-PON technologies. It has a dedicated wavelength pair (one wavelength upstream and one downstream), which is different from the wavelengths used for GPON and XGS-PON, ensuring that all three generations of the PON technologies can co-exist on the same fiber. 

Nokia Corporate Office in Antwerp, Belgium

Essentially, this means that it can be introduced without any disruption to the current customers. Further, it allows the CSPs to quickly introduce 25G PON to meet the demand for 5G mobile transport and premium enterprise market. 

25G PON is a future-proof investment for the service providers as they can continue to use these networks for several years. 

Rupert Wood, Research Director for Fiber Networks at Analysys Mason, said: “Today’s 25G PON achievement demonstrates the unlimited potential of fiber. This next evolution in fiber technology will provide enterprises with greater than 10 Gbs connectivity and the capacity needed to support 5G transport along with future next generation services such as massive scale Virtual Reality and real time digital twins.” 

A key reason for the growing popularity of PON technologies is that the CSPs need fiber broadband for more efficient mobile transport to support 5G network densification and new cloud network architectures. 

Using the existing Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) network for mobile transport allows the CSPs to quickly connect 5G small cells, eliminating the need for a dedicated transport network and helping them reduce expenditure. Simply put, 5G demands fiber networks to deliver on the promise of ultra-high-speed and extremely low latency and the PON technologies, especially 25G PON, are ideally suited for this. 

A crucial advantage of using fiber is that it has unlimited bandwidth potential, and every new generation of technology helps in unlocking more of that potential. The latest generation of the PON technology, 25G PON enables CSPs to boost the speeds and capacity of the fiber networks. 

Nokia's 25G PON solution takes advantage of the high volumes and mature ecosystem of the data center optical technologies. It brings together the traditional PON and data center technologies. Typically, PON uses long-haul metro technologies, which are adapted for PON when the metro technology reaches maturity and volume. The new approach is cost-effective because it benefits from the economies of scale since these technologies are already being deployed in massive volumes in data centers.

The Quillion Advantage

A crucial component of Nokia's 25G PON solution is its chipset, Quillion, which concurrently supports three generations of PON technologies, GPON, XGS and 25G PON.

Nokia's high-capacity access node, Lightspan FX, powered by Nokia's Quillion Chipset

Federico Guillén,
President Network Infrastructure Nokia

"The 25G PON we have deployed [in Proximus network] is enabled by Nokia's Quillion chipset, which supports three generations of PON technologies and has been adopted by more than 100 operators since its launch last year. All operators deploying the Quillion based GPON and XGS-PON solution today have the capabilities to easily evolve to 25G PON," says Federico Guillén, President Network Infrastructure Nokia. 

It also enables Software-Defined Networks (SDN) and low-latency performance. Additionally, it is 50% more energy efficient than the previous generation of chipsets, helping the service providers to bring down the operational expenditure. 

The Industry Push

Recognizing the need to advance PON networks, a coalition of service providers, system vendors and chipset manufacturers have come together to form a 25G-PON MSA (Multi-Source Agreement) Group. 

This group works to standardize the 25G PON technology to help accelerate the deployments. Several prominent service providers, including ATT (USA), Chorus (New Zealand), Chunghwa Telecom (Taiwan), INEA (Poland), nbn (Australia), OptiComm (Australia) and Proximus (Belgium), among others are part of this MSA. 

Nokia continues to work on innovations in the PON technology. It is one of the main contributors to the ITU-T 50G PON standard and showcased the industry-first 100G PON prototype earlier this year. 

With the Proximus' network deployment, Nokia's 25G PON solution is set to empower service providers to ensure cost efficiencies even as they boost the capacity and speeds of fiber networks to address new emerging market opportunities.  

More information on Nokia’s 25G PON solution.