Swisscom Testing 50G PON Fiber in a Municipality

Swisscom has deployed 50G PON fiber technology successfully in an unnamed municipality in Switzerland. This was announced by the company on July 11, 2022. A lab test was already completed by the fixed network operator for this purpose in the fall of 2020, PON stands for Passive Optical Network.

The company says it is the first telecommunications company in the world to use 50G PON “successfully in the real network”. Theoretically possible bandwidth of up to 50 Gbps is not the primary benefit of 50G-PON fiber technology, as this is hardly needed, the company said.

According to the Swisscom, 50G-PON will provide business customers with additional functions in the area of security services or the performance features of the connection. The technology significantly reduces latency compared to current standards, for example, and guarantees bandwidths through network slicing.

By 2025 at the latest, Swisscom intends to introduce the technology. PON technologies will be used in both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint networks. Where the passive splitter in a point-to-point network is placed in the central office rather than in the street manhole. The manhole in the street is a unique feature of the fixed network topology in Switzerland.

Technology possibly coming from China

Details on the equipment supplier were not provided by Swisscom when asked. “While Chinese operators and vendors are particularly active in pushing 50G PON, component and system vendors in all regions are seeing a lot of interest. I think China will be 2-3 years ahead of the rest of the world in commercializing and deploying 50G PON,” wrote Dan Grossman at Strategic Analytics in May 2022.

Previously, Huawei unveiled the fourth generation of its 50G PON prototype, which was based on the company’s Smartmax-5800 OLT product. Its 50G line card has two ports, and the transceivers are in a pluggable (SFP+) form factor.

Its prototype showed a downstream service throughput of 39.948 Gbps and an upstream of 15.986 Gbps. ZTE has also recently announced its 50G PON prototype, which claims to be the first to fully implement the ITU-T G.9804 series recommendations.