British pure fiber provider CityFibre has announced its intention to deploy 10Gbps XGS-PON access technology as standard across its networks from April 2023, with it to do so in partnership with vendors Calix and Nokia.In a press release outling its plans, the company – which bills itself as being ‘the UK’s largest carrier-neutral wholesale Full Fibre infrastructure platform’ – will begin deploying XGS-PON from April 2023, enabling the introduction of symmetrical speeds of up to 10Gbps for both residential and business users within its network footprint. It added that the rollout of XGS-PON will allow it to support more customers on each optical line termination (OLT) port, enabling ‘substantial’ network cost savings, reducing power use across its networks and improving the efficiency of its future network expansion.
CityFibre notes that its existing G-PON network was designed to enable rapid future upgrade to XGS-PON, while it said a smooth upgrade path for this has now been proven through the successful completion of a whole-city pilot G-PON to XGS-PON technology upgrade in York. This upgrade trial weas said to have been undertaken in partnership with Calix, LambdaNetworks and Splice Group. The pilot project’s purpose was to evaluate and address all the technical, process and customer experience challenges of upgrading CityFibre’s live network, and the operator said the first customers have now been connected to the new platform ‘with near perfect optical testing results’.
Commenting on the matter, John Franklin, Chief Technology and Information Officer at CityFibre, said: ‘By partnering with Calix and Nokia we now have two trusted and market-leading technology vendors underpinning a nationwide 10Gbps XGS-PON technology deployment programme … Our parallel deployment of a high-capacity national backbone to carry virtually unlimited traffic alongside this XGS-PON deployment programme will deliver a highly efficient and adaptable network for the future. This in turn will enable our ISP partners to offer a differentiated range of services in full confidence that speed and service quality can be maintained as consumer and business bandwidth demand continues to rise.’