ADTRAN upgrades NG-PON2 to support 5G and mission critical services

ADTRAN’s NG-PON2 platform enables dense 5G mobile networks with capacity, performance, and reliability

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - Aug. 16, 2017: ADTRAN^® , Inc., (NASDAQ:ADTN), a leading provider of next-generation open networking solutions, today announced that it has taken the next step in mobilizing Software Defined Access by successfully demonstrating non-service impacting wavelength agility and ultra-low latency with its NG-PON2 solution. These milestones were reached in April in support of ADTRAN’s SD-Access strategy for mobile networks, announced at the 2017 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, making it the first in the world to achieve these milestones. ADTRAN’s NG-PON2 wavelength agility delivers the reliability required to support Service Level Agreements (SLA) for the most demanding mission critical applications. Non-service impacting wavelength agility also provides increased network resiliency and real-time elastic capacity, and delivers a mechanism to optimize utilization of available optical wavelengths in the access network.

According to a report by CIR, 5G densification promises to be a watershed application for NG-PON2, representing a nearly $1B market opportunity by 2026. This will be driven by NG-PON2’s ability to accelerate the path to 5G due to the scale advantages PON-based fiber networks have over P2P and mmWave Xhaul options.

“We expect NG-PON2 shipments to start ramping up in 2019, then nearly double every year for the next couple of years after that. This would be perfect timing to deploy NG-PON2 to backhaul 5G networks as capacity requirements on some 5G networks will be significantly higher than today’s 4G networks,” said Alam Tamboli, Senior Analyst, Dell'Oro Group, Inc.

“Network operators are looking for a more cost-effective, scalable and highly available network architecture to ensure that 5G services can be delivered anywhere, to anyone, at home, work or play,” said Ryan McCowan, Director of Portfolio Management for Fiber Access & Aggregation at ADTRAN. “ADTRAN’s NG-PON2 solutions deliver the resiliency, multi-gigabit scale and latency requirements needed to support mission critical applications. These capabilities demonstrate how NG-PON2 can be a keystone access technology for the future of service delivery for both fixed and mobile broadband.”

To date, PON technologies, originally developed for fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) applications, have not been considered robust enough for SLA-based services, including the upcoming wave of 5G and IoT services that operators are planning to offer and customers are hopeful to leverage. Addressing the variety of 5G backhaul, crosshaul, and fronthaul applications also requires very low latency, a trait not traditionally associated with PON technologies. ADTRAN’s demonstrating non-service impacting wavelength switching in less than 50 milliseconds on its NG-PON2 OLTs presents the market an economic, scalable solution for network operators worldwide. ADTRAN has also demonstrated sub-20 microsecond network latency through NG-PON2, enabling even the most demanding 5G fronthaul applications to take advantage of the economics of PON networks while retaining the resiliency and performance previously attainable only with point-to-point fiber. Combined with ADTRAN’s proven leadership in software-defined access networks, NG-PON2 can deliver the performance, the programmability, and the multi-gigabit ubiquity required to support small cell 5G densification initiatives and the high bandwidth and highly responsive mission critical mobile services they support.

SD-Access based NG-PON2 has the potential to rapidly accelerate the path to 5G, reducing the time to market for automatous cars, tactile internet, massive IoT, and enhanced broadband applications such as 8k video, augmented and virtual reality and artificial intelligence. As the leader in NG-PON2 technology, ADTRAN is well positioned to provide the fiber access infrastructure for 5G.