Top 3 Reasons To Skip 25G and Go Straight to 50G PON

To ensure your broadband network infrastructure can deliver services today and well into the future, broadband service providers (BSPs) must focus on the fundamentals. These include selecting products that support industry standards, identifying critical use cases for network needs over the next decade, and looking for solutions that leverage economies of scale. With this in mind, let's look at the case for 25G PON (passive optical network).

Three Fundamental Reasons To Skip 25G PON

First, 25G PON MSA (multi-source agreement) is not an industry standard. Instead, 25G PON MSA is controlled by a single vendor-and owning the supply chain means they can prioritize their needs over others. Given the past dynamics in supply shortages, the last thing BSPs should worry about is that their PON optical line terminal (OLT) and optical network terminal (ONT) provider won't have ample supply-or that the available supply is prioritized to tier 1 providers. Additionally, the emergence of 50G PON technology with higher bandwidth and better cost efficiency has made 25G PON less attractive.

Second, 25G PON provides 21 Gbps of payload capacity, which is insufficient to meet the needs of the upcoming use cases and applications anticipated over the next decade. The chart below compares services type versus PON technologies and demonstrates that 10G PON, especially XGS-PON, meets the demands of residential, small business, and aggregation for the foreseeable future. The main applications driving capacity beyond 10G are aggregation and service convergence for private networks, large companies, and wireless and mobile networks. Wi-Fi 7 standards, for instance, need 30 Gbps of throughput. As a result, the industry focus has shifted to 50G PON.

Figure 1: Service and PON Technology Assessment