Industry’s first XGS-PON Plugfest extends PON interoperability

Tauxigny, France, December 15, 2016: Major companies from across the globe gathered at LAN’s Digital Applications Laboratory in Tauxigny for the first XGS-PON Interop Plugfest, co-organized by the Full Service Access Network (FSAN) Group and the Broadband Forum.

XGS-PON is based on the ITU-T’s latest Recommendation (ITU-T G.9807.1), providing a symmetrical 10Gbit/s capability over a legacy fiber infrastructure that can co-exist with G-PON which is now dominating Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) deployments worldwide.

The event saw involvement from leading industry names: Huawei, Nokia, ZTE, ADTRAN, Broadcom, Calix, Econet, MT2 and Sagemcom, with more than 30 engineers attending with the aim of testing implementation and interoperability.

For the Broadband Forum, this Plugfest extends its work in the field of PON interoperability, building on its G-PON and XG-PON ONU Certification program, as an answer to the industry’s increasing need to secure both maturity of the ITU-T Recommendations and provide a migration path to operators looking for next generation PONs.

“We’re really pleased with the success of the Plugfest, in particular the number of engineers in attendance from an impressive breadth of companies,” said Robin Mersh, Broadband Forum CEO. “As networks converge and technologies become increasingly dependent on each other to deliver a high-quality service, interoperability is essential. Working with LAN and FSAN on events such as the Plugfest is absolutely crucial to the Broadband Forum as we continue to look at the next generation of fiber access and build upon the success of our G-PON BBF.247 Certification program.”

Philippe Lucas, SVP Strategy, Architecture & Standardization from Orange, said: “Orange is very pleased that the industry has been able to provide implementations in such a short time frame between the start of the standardization and the first Plugfest. “XGS-PON offers an evolution path within the PON infrastructure and covers a number of anticipated use cases beyond GPON. Interoperability Plugfests are considered a major achievement in assessing technology maturity, and that helps to bring confidence to operators before they consider any significant deployments.”

Thierry Doligez, Director of LAN, added: “This Plugfest was one of our most successful events, involving the best of PON expertise from leading OLT, ONU, chipset and test tools manufacturers. During this very intensive week of tests, we observed significant positive results on interoperability between participants’ solutions, which confirms the dynamism and the potential of this new XGS-PON technology.”