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Network access provider Openreach (BT) has this morning announced that they intend to expand their ongoing pilot of 10Gbps capable XGS-PON based Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP technology, which over the next 12 months will be made available to “more than a million premises” across the United Kingdom. But a third of its full fibre network could be covered over the next 5 years.
Openreach’s existing full fibre network is currently still largely based off older Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) technology, which places limitations on how fast it can go before capacity becomes an issue. For example, GPON supports a capacity on each trunk line of up to 2.5Gbps (Gigabits per second) downstream and 1.24Gbps upstream, which needs to be shared between several premises. The fastest consumer broadband download speeds on this network currently reach up to 1.8Gbps (120Mbps upload).
In response the operator has been busy running a customer pilot of a new 10Gbps (10,000Mbps) capable Passive Optical Network (PON) technology, called XGS-PON – the ‘X’ stands for 10, the ‘G’ for Gigabits’ and the ‘S’ for Symmetric speed. This is being offered at maximum symmetric speeds of up to 8.5Gbps and at present EE still seems to be the only broadband ISP able to offer such packages (here).