10g residential CPE

Fri Dec 25 03:53:42 UTC 2020

On 12/24/20 7:13 PM, Steven Karp wrote:
> Copper 2.5 Gbps Multi-gig uplinks on Wifi 6 gateways are coming out in 
> 2021 from most vendors.
> 
> I am using XGS PON in trials and have been impressed with the speed and 
> cost.

Pretty much this.  XGS-PON seems to be "here now" and the costs on both 
the CO and CPE side have gotten down to where it's probably worth going 
straight to it (skipping GPON) in new deployments unless you think you 
can get away with just GPON for 5+ years.  I'm not sure if it's worth 
overlaying existing GPON deployments yet, but we're getting close, and 
offering "multi-gig" is, while still not very useful from a practical 
point of view for most customers, a potential marketing advantage.

I've been only recommending GPON for new, greenfield deployments in 
rural situations where expected speeds are low to begin with, density is 
low, and there may be a desire to push the optical link budget as it is 
a bit better than typical XGS-PON systems.  That's been the case for 
about a year, now.

Customer facing routers are not quite there, yet.  I think Asus has one, 
but I've seen mixed reviews.  And what's out now is still limited to 
2.5GBASE-T and often only on the WAN port (LAN ports are still 
1000BASE-T) meaning in practice customers can't get any more than 
gigabit speeds to a single endpoint (not that many endpoints can keep 
up, anyway) for that all-important speed test.

One of my router vendors has been teasing me with a "true 10Gb" router 
due out 1Q 2021.  I've been told to expect NBASE-T (1G, 2.5G, 5G, 10G) 
on both WAN and all LAN ports + 802.11ax "Wifi 6" with at least 5Gbps of 
real-world IPv4 throughput with NAT and essentially wire-speed IPv6 
without NAT or content inspection at a realistic price point.  I'll be 
interested to see what they actually deliver as that would make 
future-looking multi-gig deployments actually meaningful.

Of course, you can replace XGS-PON with 10G-EPON if that's your 
preference.  I actually kinda prefer the IEEE versions, but most of my 
vendors concentrate on the ITU/Bellcore stuff in North America, so 
GPON/XGS-PON it is.
-- 
Brandon Martin