Exactly. All they said about XGS-PON is that they will start talking to their customers about what their future requirements might be.

They also only said that the symmetric will be in some new project gigabit areas in order to gauge demand. This is looking like a relatively small trial of symmetric so they can get some understanding of what customers are willing to pay for. My guess is it will be a while before that gets a national launch and possibly even longer before XGS-PON has much footprint in the network.

Article over at ISPreview (and subsequent updates) about it, indicated it would be a full commercial release rather than a limited trial…

Guess we’ll find out come April

In reply to a post by candlerb:

Exactly. All they said about XGS-PON is that they will start talking to their customers about what their future requirements might be.

From that article, it seems discussions are already happening. I suspect we may see 1gbits down/up nationally this year but given how many isps have launched a 1.2gbits or 1.8gbits product the average use may have wait a while.

OR may be upgrading the customers incrementally in terms of speed so that they can adjust a good way

Arguably 1G symmetric on Openreach GPON would be simpler to achieve from an ISP perspective than supporting 1.6/1.8Gbps asymmetric.

From an Openreach perspective it’s nothing more then pushing another speed profile onto their OLT estate. They don’t need to change anything. It’s just a soft change. Therefore they could “roll it out” nationally next week if they wanted…

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Arguably 1G symmetric on Openreach GPON would be simpler to achieve from an ISP perspective than supporting 1.6/1.8Gbps asymmetric.

completely agree.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

From an Openreach perspective it’s nothing more then pushing another speed profile onto their OLT estate. They don’t need to change anything. It’s just a soft change. Therefore they could “roll it out” nationally next week if they wanted…

Yup, they are more worried about how it will impact upload speeds, which i think they have enough data to have made a good business case on implementing it.

Yes they are just incredibly risk averse, even though their own data supports the conclusion that this isn’t an “issue” just like it hasn’t been for CityFibre amongst others that run 1G symmetric over GPON for years.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Yes they are just incredibly risk averse, even though their own data supports the conclusion that this isn’t an “issue” just like it hasn’t been for CityFibre amongst others that run 1G symmetric over GPON for years.

they have dynamic throttling on the download as it is, and mostly its fine and i really can't see more then 2 users on a 30 user pon having 1Gbit symmetrical. Only heard of a video guy who ended up having the pon split into two. Spliting a pon into two isn't that expensive (as long you have spare fibre) to do.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Yes they are just incredibly risk averse, even though their own data supports the conclusion that this isn’t an “issue” just like it hasn’t been for CityFibre amongst others that run 1G symmetric over GPON for years.

even going to xgs-pon shouldn't be an issue in terms of cpe install. Its a shame theres no combined gpon/xgs-pon ont, as you could move users dynamically between the two depending on bandwidth needs .

In reply to a post by Taras:

Its a shame theres no combined gpon/xgs-pon ont, as you could move users dynamically between the two depending on bandwidth needs .

That wouldn't make sense. If you sent someone an XGS-PON capable ONT, then just put them on the XGS-PON network. You can sell slow services over XGS-PON too...