Espoo, Finland – Today, Nokia announced that Chorus, New Zealand's largest open-access internet infrastructure company, and 2Degrees, the country’s leading retail service provider, have activated its 25G PON solution in a live commercial network. New Zealand Cherry Corp will become the first customer to benefit from 25G PON, leveraging its capacity, latency, and reliability to revolutionize its farming methods.

High-speed connectivity is driving a new wave of advanced Industry 4.0 and smart farming applications. Reece van der Velden, General Manager at Cherry Corp, emphasized the importance of this connectivity, stating: “Everything we do is captured electronically, which means we use a tremendous amount of data. Fiber enables reliable, high-speed, low-latency connectivity for real-time processing. We are transitioning from on-premises services to cloud AI-based processing to enhance productivity, reduce cost, and become more dynamic. This transformation requires streaming 400,000 high-definition photos per hour to the cloud for data processing and sending feedback in real time. Therefore, low latency and high upstream speed to the cloud are key. If we continue to evolve in this way, we anticipate increasing our harvest from 55 million to 150 million cherries, which is incredibly exciting.”

Fiber broadband is becoming increasingly relevant for industries because it is the fastest, greenest, and most reliable access technology. The pilot project demonstrates the transformative impact 25G PON can have on business practices and industry 4.0 applications. Using Nokia’s next-generation fiber technology, Chorus can quickly enhance the fiber network capacity and enable retail service providers like 2Degrees to deliver higher-speed connectivity and new use cases that drive more efficiency, productivity, and lower overall energy consumption.

Ewen Powell, Chief Information Officer at Chorus, said: “Nokia’s 25G PON solution allows us to provide our customers with the capacity they need to offer new services and applications that require a reliable, ultra-fast connection, such as Agriculture 4.0, Industry 4.0, mobile transport, and advanced enterprise connectivity. Running 25G PON alongside XGS-PON and GPON will allow us to converge many more services and retail service providers onto our network, providing greater choice and quality for end-customers.”

Sandy Motley, President of Nokia Fixed Networks, said: “Fiber broadband networks have great potential that operators just started tapping in because you can increase bandwidth in a very efficient way and leverage the infrastructure to connect everything. When we designed our Quillion chipset, a key requirement was to be able to support multiple PON technologies on the same fiber, giving operators the flexibility to offer different service levels dependent on the customers’ needs.”