The world’s first G-PON certification program – announced by the Broadband Forum in Paris on Tuesday – looks set to fuel the arrival of Superfast Broadband networks around the world.
The news, unveiled on the opening day of the Broadband World Forum, brought an enthusiastic response from some of the world’s leading network operators, including China Telecom and France Telecom.
“G-PON Certification will certainly enable us to accelerate the widespread availability of faster broadband,” said Mr Leping Wei on behalf of China Telecom, the world’s largest network operator.
“With the Chinese market moving towards an estimated 250 million subscriber lines by 2015 and a household penetration of 50%, China Telecom sees G-PON and the advent of certified G-PON products as an important step in making this a reality," he added.
GPON certification is also regarded as a key building block towards interoperability on a truly global scale, a point regarded as “critical for mass deployment in the Chinese market,” by Mr Leping.
To help the industry expedite fiber network rollout, the Broadband Forum’s G-PON ONU (Optical Network Unit) Certification program is expected to pave the way for swift expansion of superfast broadband and the development of new technologies. It is based on test plans developed by the Forum and work undertaken jointly with FSAN (Full Service Access Network). Beta testing is already completing and the commercial program is likely to open to industry participation next month.
“This certification is key to speeding up our FTTH deployments,” said Alain Maloberti, SVP Network Architecture and Design, France Telecom Orange.
“It reduces dramatically the amount of specific testing needed before we choose and deploy new equipment. It will enable next generation systems to come to the market faster and with interoperability from day one,” he added.
The certification program, known as BBF.247, is open to GPON ONU products with Ethernet interfaces and is based on the Forum’s OD-247 test plan. It proves conformance to TR-156 using OMCI as defined in the ITU G.998, which are the most critical standards to interoperable implementations. Additional test cases and modules for other configurations and functionalities will be added in the future.
"G-PON has proven to be a viable and successful technology for access networks worldwide," said Martin Carroll of Verizon, FSAN Committee Chair. "Fully endorsed by FSAN, the Broadband Forum G-PON Certification program will further substantiate G-PON capability to meet the growing demands of evolving operator networks."
The Broadband Forum is a non-profit organization comprising more than 200 of the world’s leading telecommunications service providers, vendors and research establishments.
ENDS
