In the past, our need for speed has manifested itself in fast cars, rollercoasters, rockets to the moon and breaking sound barriers. Today, speed has a whole new persona that is less about pounding adrenaline and cheap thrills and a lot more about convenience, efficiency and instantaneous gratification. It is all about Adtran’s XGS-PON 10G technology.
For those of us who have been around long enough to watch internet speeds evolve from noisy toe-tapping dial-up connections, to 64kbits per second cable broadband, to 20Mbps fiber optic broadband – well, the arrival of gigabit fiber was nothing short of “lightning fast.” We went from waiting for an hour for a movie to download to less than 10 minutes. That is like prehistoric man learning to cook with gas for the first time!
So, imagine my surprise when I started reading about Adtran selling their XGS-PON 10 gigabit internet technology to customers all over the world to the tune of a 300% year-over-year growth in market share.
I spoke to Adtran chief technical officer Ryan McCowan, who is also assistant vice president of Portfolio Strategy to ask him how much faster can we go and keep our feet on the ground?
“The interesting thing about it is the fiber basically has unlimited capacity,” he said. “Right now, with gig technology, we are only using like 1/10,000th of the capacity inherent in the optical fiber.”
I was stunned, but he assured me it will not stop at 10G.
“The next big step is 50G and Adtran is already working on it. You can expect to see it show up in the marketplace within the next decade.”
He put it into perspective for me.
“If you think about Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone network they built, it has served our needs for about 100 years. The fiber networks internet service providers (ISP) are laying today will do the same, and Adtran will keep improving and upgrading the electronics that plug into each end of the fiber. Adtran’s XGS-PON turns up the speed, literally ‘lighting up’ the fiber. That is how we will provide more speed over time.”
What can we do with that kind of internet speed, I wondered. I have a gig and all the past buffering has stopped, my games no longer spin, and I don’t cut in and out anymore on Zoom calls.
Ryan suggested I look at it in the same light as my electricity.
“You don’t have to worry that if you run the dishwasher and the air conditioning at the same time you will run out of power. With 10G I don’t have to worry about what anybody else in the house is doing.
“Over the past two years many people have been working remotely and many still are. With that much capacity, nothing anybody else is doing bothers me.”
Ryan said from a family standpoint, he likes to download a couple of movies onto a tablet for the kids to watch in the car on the road to their grandmother’s house, only sometimes he forgets to do it until the last minute just as they are about to leave.
“With 10 gig, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom – movies are downloaded with almost no wait and you are out the door.”
He said it is a big factor with gaming too.
“Some of these PlayStation games are 40 to 50 gig downloads. On a slower connection you have to start the download before you go to work or school and by the time you get home that afternoon, it will be done.
“With gig internet, huge games take 10 or 15 minutes to download.”
And finally, cell towers easily use that much speed.
“One of the intentions with cell towers, especially with 5G, is to make the thing on the tower really dumb and put the brains back at headquarters.
“To do that, you need more bandwidth in between the two, so that’s the idea for increasing the speed in the next generation of 5G – smaller cell towers with smaller areas of coverage so they can get a lot more speed.
Who are Adtran’s customers for XGS-PON/10G PON?
Traditional ISPs include telephone, cable and telecom companies but Ryan said Adtran is increasingly seeing a new phenomenon of customer.
“Small rural American cities are not going to be a priority for the big ISPs, so we are seeing a lot of community entities and city governments, even a lot of electric utilities and co-ops building their own fiber networks.
“Glass is cheap. Dishes are expensive. The cost of fiber optic cable is not expensive but building a fiber optic infrastructure is, so if you’re building a new network, you want to make it state-of-the-art in the beginning, so you don’t have to upgrade for at least 10 years.”
One of the motivations to do this comes from the more than $40 billion in government subsidies going to companies to help them build fiber networks, especially in underserved areas.
“The technology is growing in volume all over the globe and we keep enhancing and tweaking the electronics since those parts are on a faster upgrade cycle than the technology itself.
What about costs for 10G service among the residential market? My bill increased significantly when I went with gig. How much will it increase with 10G?
“Here in the U.S., a gig is still seen as a premium product but in other parts of the world that is not necessarily the case,” he said. “We see several markets in Europe where the price for 2G, 5G or even 10 gig service is not much higher than gig service, at least not for residential.”
From the ISP perspective, increasingly faster broadband lets them use the technology to put homes, businesses and even cell towers all on the same network.
“What they’ve done in the past is build different networks, so I have one network for residential, another network for large enterprise businesses, and I probably have my cell towers on still another network,” Ryan said. “Now you can have one network with enough capacity to serve all those different purposes at the same time. It’s all one technology and it doesn’t matter whether it is a house or a business or a cell tower. And that has all kinds of efficiencies in terms of the cost to build it and the cost to operate it.”
Also, historically gigabit connectivity has been asymmetrical – that is, the up speed (sending) is slower than the down speed (receiving). With XGS-PON it is the same both ways.
“It has been asymmetrical because residential customers tend to download more than they upload,” Ryan said. “That shifted the past couple of years since everybody has been working at home, and especially when using Zoom or some other remote service, the video streams are sending a lot more data up while the downloads are still as much if not more than usual.
“Businesses too have always tended to be the same up and down so 10G makes them even.”
Recent research reports from two research firms highlight Adtran’s market impact and growth and both show Adtran ranking #2 and #3 for XGS-PON shipments in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
In 2021 alone, Adtran saw its 10G fiber access platforms broadly selected and deployed in nearly 100 U.S. regional and municipal networks, well positioning Adtran to help operators close the digital divide for everyone, everywhere.
Adtran has had the original idea for XGS-PON technology since 2015 and it has been in the works for quite some time. Adtran led the way for XGS-PON in the global marketplace and really got the ball rolling but they are not the only company selling it.
“In the technology standards arena, at least for communications, large service providers don’t want to buy proprietary technology,” Ryan explained. “They want something that is standardized globally, that they can get from multiple providers.
“Adtran brought XGS-PON to meet universal standards, shepherding the technology through the standardization process and jumpstarted the 10G market.”
I say watch out! Supersonic 50G will be here in a flash.
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