Verizon Talks NG-PON2 and AXOS

Today Calix and Verizon announced large-scale deployments of AXOS and NG-PON2. In light of that news I caught up with Vincent O'Byrne, Verizon's Director of Planning Technology to chat about NG-PON2 and network architectures.

Teresa: Vincent, you’ve mentioned that single wavelength systems like XGS-PON are really only interim solutions, can you expand on that?

Vincent: NG-PON2 is a multi-wavelength technology supporting 4 wavelengths today and moving to 8 in the near future. NG-PON2 enables us to bring all our services networks, e.g., residential, business and wireless, onto a single optical distribution network (ODN) in a scalable pay-as-you-grow model, and it allows us to maintain our network while meeting our critical business customer SLA's. This becomes a more efficient and cost-effective network with NG-PON2 as a universal access platform.

Teresa: NG-PON2 is considered a technology that can help future-proof the network, XGS-PON provides 10G of bandwidth, why isn't it just as good?

Vincent: NG-PON2 provides not only 4x10G of bandwidth now, but it also provides the ability to bond the channels together so that when we need greater than 10G of bandwidth to a single customer or location, we can deliver it. Calix demonstrated 20G/20G in 2016 and work has been done in the standards to formalize this option for NGPON2. NG-PON2 multi-wavelength capabilities also provide improved support for very latency sensitive applications (e.g., Wireless front haul) by providing the ability to remove the latency and jitter associated with quiet window inherent with other TDM PON technologies.

Teresa: You mentioned earlier that NG-PON2 lets you bring all your services networks to a single ODN, but that is just the fiber infrastructure, how are you consolidating the network elements that deliver these services?

Vincent: Verizon is simplifying its overall network from the core to the access network. So, as an example, we decided to simplify the Central office and look at integrating the subscriber management, presently deployed as a separate box in our FiOS network into the OLT. This reduces complexity and cost in our network.

Teresa: What have you seen as the most important benefits of having subscriber management (BNG functionality) closer to the subscriber or in other words a distributed BNG?

Vincent: This will simplify CO architecture and provisioning as there is no need to coordinate between the dedicated BNG device and the OLT.  It also simplifies operations and capacity management and QoS models as it eliminates the present BNG-OLT bottleneck, reduces space, power, costs (EF&I, Capex, and Maintenance) and typically utilizes off the shelf components, which is more in line with future SDN needs. Having BNG functionality closer to the subscriber also allows us to deploy content caching closer to the subscribers and optimize capacity on the transport network.

You can read the press release here and learn more about the deployment and solutions making them happen here.