KPN has announced a first-in-the-Netherlands fibre broadband demonstration which it says offers ‘a glimpse into the future’ – an 8Gbps download/upload connection was demoed at a residential location in Amersfoort’s Vathorst district using the telco’s PON fibre technology.
KPN installed an Optical Network Terminal (ONT, on the premises) and Optical Line Terminal (OLT, in the street cabinet) both supporting speeds up to 10Gbps. CTO Babak Fouladi declared: ‘This demonstration shows what our investments in technology will bring to our customers in the future … In the coming period, we will continue to develop at much higher speeds that will further shape the digitisation of the Netherlands and from which the customer will also reap the benefits in the long term.’
As previously reported by CommsUpdate, KPN doubled its commercial consumer broadband peak download speed to 1Gbps on 1 March 2020, covering an initial 1.2 million addresses. By end-2021, KPN expects all its fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) customers to have access to the new gigabit option, while peak upload speed – initially capped at 500Mbps – is expected to be boosted to 1Gbps by end-2020. TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Database notes that KPN declared it would use GPON – and not its existing P2P fibre architecture – in all its new FTTH area deployments across the Netherlands from Q4 2019 onwards, with the telco currently expanding FTTH in more than 70 areas of the country, under its target of growing its FTTH footprint by one million new households between end-2018 and end-2021 to reach approximately 3.3 million homes, or around 41% of all Dutch households. The KPN NetwerkNL division is responsible for the construction and management of the new FTTH network sections, deployed on an open network basis enabling other providers to offer retail services over the infrastructure alongside KPN.