News of trial Openreach 1.2 and 1.8Gbps FTTP speed tiers

Interesting trial:
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2022/09/openre...

New Nokia & Adtran ONTs with 2.5Gbps interface:
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2022/09/pictur...

Still on GPON rather than XGS-PON, just squeezing it more.

Personally, I think them trying to increase FTTP speeds up to 1.8Gbps on GPON is really not good, lets hope the pilot fails and they instead move anyone who wants above 900Mbps onto XGS-PON.

The sixty four million dollar question is when Openreach will begin migration to XGS-PON (or indeed subsequent updates).

But for now it’s GPON only for them and they could squeeze more out of it as CityFibre do with their GPON network, running it symmetrically for example.

Most PONs actually aren’t as heavily subscribed as what you may think, so in fact have quite a bit of capacity. @XGS_Is_On has previously commented on this fact.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

The sixty four million dollar question is when Openreach will begin migration to XGS-PON (or indeed subsequent updates).
But for now it’s GPON only for them and they could squeeze more out of it as CityFibre do with their GPON network, running it symmetrically for example.

I thought CityFibre did announce they are upgrading all the installed to XGS-PON already, which makes sense. Hopefully OR will get that approved by the "financial controllers" and move to XGS-PON deployment in the near future!

Most PONs actually aren’t as heavily subscribed as what you may think, so in fact have quite a bit of capacity. @XGS_Is_On has previously commented on this fact.

I wonder if this is because at the moment FTTP is sold for "increased speed", at a higher cost ? I know many people whom are very happy with 40-50 Mbps, but would like increased reliability for the same price. Then takeup could increase, but at those lower speeds plenty of capacity.

And I selfishly hope they don’t spend a penny on XGS-PON until those of us missed by the current fibre rollout get fibre 😢

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

And I selfishly hope they don’t spend a penny on XGS-PON until those of us missed by the current fibre rollout get fibre 😢

Well I hope when they deploy in my town that they use modern XGS-PON hardware instead of 5 year old GPON hardware, but yes don't add any delays due to XGS. We have an alt-net deploying across town (other side of motorway) but no sign of OR.

One interesting point is that GPON is split 30 ways, and XGS-PON can be split 128 ways. So for downstream the actual bandwidth available per user is similar. I'd hope that openreach and the altnets all have monitoring in place, and have a good idea as to the spare capacity.

I do also wonder how much the contention on the PON impacts things vs the contention for backhaul and the internet in general.

Also domestically it must be getting more and more difficult to make full use of the higher speeds for a prolonged periods of time. I have a 350MB service but even with a mesh WiFi system I struggle to get above 100MB in all but one room. I expect most people wouldn't notice speed drops due to contention up to a point. This could of course all change when a killer app is found that needs high speed

It wouldn't surprise me if most of the new installs of OLTs weren't XGS-PON ready, or easily upgraded. Its a shame that the ONTs being installed are GPON only

In reply to a post by mwarby:

This could of course all change when a killer app is found that needs high speed

The people whom seem to be wanting Gigabit are those whom download those insanely large games using either PS5/XBox or a PC and they're all using Ethernet connections.

Show how out of touch I am with gaming lol, I thought it was still mostly optical media. Still hopefully there would be enough randomness to minimize the impact. A bigger problem could be P2P file sharing as that could have high sustained usage, but I think its less of a problem now than it was