Nokia maintains 25G PON momentum with HKBN and Chorus

Keeping up its recent pace of optical network technology roll-out, Nokia has announced two more 25G PON deployments with operators in the Asia-Pacific region – fixed network operator Hong Kong Broadband Network Limited (HKBN) and New Zealand’s largest open-access internet infrastructure company Chorus.

HKBN claims to be the first fixed network operator in Asia to deploy 25G PON within the island territory and regards the new solution as enabling it to provide its residential and enterprise customers with access to 20Gbps symmetrical broadband service. This, said Nokia, makes it one of the fastest in the world, paving the way for a new era of connectivity with high-speed, low-latency broadband access, essential for new applications and business services powering today’s digital economy.

Nokia added that with the growth of the digital economy, operators like HKBN are increasingly wanting to offer new services that can deliver the ultimate user experience and evolve with their customers’ broadband needs. Based on the Quillion chipset, the 25G PON fibre broadband solution is said to allow HKBN to reuse its existing fibre broadband equipment to immediately address demand for more capacity and enhanced broadband services.

“Since 2004, HKBN has been the market leader in introducing Hong Kong’s first fibre-to-the-home broadband service. With an unwavering commitment to innovation, we have joined forces with Nokia to achieve a ground-breaking upgrade, proudly providing customers with a revolutionary 25Gbps broadband speed that meets their ever-increasing demands for network connectivity,” said William Yeung, HKBN co-owner, executive vice-chairman and group CEO.

“Looking ahead, we will continue to stay at the forefront of technological advancements, investing resources to expand network coverage and upgrade infrastructure. This will enable more households and businesses to benefit from our exceptional and high-quality services,” added Yeung.

Roland Montagne, director and principal analyst for FTTH at research firm IDATE, added: “The momentum behind 25G PON continues to build, with the number of deployments growing substantially over the past year. Clearly, the ability to quickly upgrade GPON and XGS-PON to deliver true 25Gbps without having to deploy additional network elements is attractive for large operators like HKBN that want to deliver 25G PON services to customers.”

Meanwhile, New Zealand open-access internet infrastructure company Chorus has activated a Nokia 25G PON solution in a live commercial network for the country’s leading retail service provider 2Degrees.

Nokia believes high-speed connectivity is driving a new wave of advanced Industry 4.0 and smart farming applications. Fresh fruit provider New Zealand Cherry Corp will become the first customer to use the 25G PON to take advantage of its capacity, latency and reliability to revolutionise its farming methods.

“Everything we do is captured electronically, which means we use a tremendous amount of data. Fibre enables reliable, high-speed, low-latency connectivity for real-time processing. We are transitioning from on-premises services to cloud artificial intelligence-based processing to enhance productivity, reduce cost and become more dynamic,” explained Cherry Corp’s general manager, Reece van der Velden, emphasising the importance of such connectivity.

“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,” he added.