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40 Gig NG-PON2 almost ready

Boston Financial District skyline 320 Verizon planning business customers in 2017. Vincent O’Byrne doesn't believe 10 gig down, 2.5 up is enough for Verizon's future. He has begun trials of 40 gig down, 10 gig up NG-PON2 with Calix and Adtran, with the intent to start purchasing within a year. Boston's new fiber network would be a natural place for them; Verizon would be able to offer 10 gig inexpensively to the giant companies in Boston's financial district. The same gear will probably be natural for Verizon's 2018 test of 5G highband, which will need massive backhaul. mmWaves do not go far and will need cells every few hundred meters.

The same gear will probably be natural for Verizon's 2018 test of 5G highband, which will need massive backhaul. mmWaves do not go far and will need cells every few hundred meters.

Also called TWDM PON, the OLT delivers 4 wavelengths at 10 gig each. Calix says they can bond them, to deliver 40 gig to a customer.

U.S. Q2: Huge losses at telcos (-361K), huge gains at cable (+553K)

Singularity in half the U.S.? Cable is now 50/5 or higher for nearly everyone. The numbers from Leichtman are inescapable; Cable is clobbering DSL in the U.S. The question mark after "singularity" is only because this is a single quarter; another quarter or two and the death march will be almost irreversible. Telco broadband dying across much of the United States wasn't inevitable. DSL is still beating cable in Canada, England, and France.

For several years, nearly everyone except a few top analysts and the companies involved thought cable was decisively knocking out telcos. I frequently pointed out that telcos were doing fine in about ~50M homes with faster DSL (AT&T U-Verse, millions at Century) or fiber (Verizon FiOS.) The losses were coming in the about ~25M homes AT&T and Verizon hadn't upgraded in a decade or more. They intend to shut down landlines for most of them, expecting to be more profitable because many would switch to their wireless.

SDN Works! Adtran demo

Adtran SDV demo
SDN is object oriented programming brought to telco networks. Adtran showed an impressive but still early version at their press event. Named Mosaic, it is already managing G.fast at trials in 65 telcos. The 40 gig NG-PON2 units Verizon is testing also run under Mosaic. From a single console controlling more than a dozen pieces of equipment, Adtran showed they can run "Configure, Deploy and Activate" on any of the boxes, not all of which are made by Adtran.

Their Huntsville SDN demo was along a long wall. To the left of the picture was an 8086 type of Linux PC, about $5,000 worth, running ONOS and Adtran's Mosaic software suite. Underneath it were off the shelf boxes, 48x10G switches, 32x100G switches, and 16x10G PON OLTs. To the right of the monitor was an Adtran box running SHDSL; a 16 port G.fast box, 2 x 10 gig OLTs, 2 G.fast CPE, a carrier Ethernet unit, and gateways connected to the 10 gig PON. The switches were leaf and spine, from an obscure vendor in a white box.

The controller could have been a thousand miles away in the cloud.

Breakthrough claimed for 10 gigabit tunable lasers

90% cheaper, Adtran believes. NG-PON2 is a high-end design that can use several frequencies for system performance up to 40 gigabits. Verizon intends to deploy to business customers in 2017 and presumably soon for advanced wireless backhaul, including the 5G build for Boston. Unfortunately, tunable lasers for the multiple frequencies are brutally expensive, as much as $1,000.

Kevin Schneider, Jared Cress, and team wondered if a different design and volume manufacturing could bring NG-PON2 closer to mass deployment. Tunable lasers have mostly been used for backbone and high-end gear, like dense wave division multiplexing. That market is less sensitive to price and volume too small for efficient manufacturing. Adtran promises, "An order of magnitude drop in costs."

The new design gained credibility when Verizon made a point of including Adtran in a trial of NG-PON2 with a substantial order expected.

Qualcomm's Brenner: LTE-U may go nowhere because it can't pass interference tests (First look)

Broadcom Wi Fi 320 Wi-Fi Alliance draft test spec is -82 dBm; Verizon wants -72 dBm. Neutral parties think -82 dBm is much too high. These are log scales; even a few dBm are a big difference. Mike Calabrese, one of the best in D.C. claims Verizon-Qualcomm LTE-U plans will interfere with as many as half the Wi-Fi connections unless it backs away well below -80 dBm. (Below) He uses the chart here from Broadcom, which I'm told is based on CableLabs data. New York City says testing on their fast-building LinkNYC discovers problems unless LTE-U backs away if there are signals down to -90 dBm.

Dean Brenner of Qualcomm put out an angry statement that -82 dBm would kill LTE-U, even though neutral parties think it already is too much of a compromise.

"This year" for Gigabit LTE at SKT

Qualcomm gig 320 Qualcomm is sampling chips and expects devices this year. "Last year, we were the first to provide an LTE Service with a speed of 500 Mbps and this year we push that up to 1 Giga bps." Korea's SKT said on the investor call. AT&T & Sprint could also offer a gig by ~2018 according to my analysis of their spectrum holding, as could the new network in Rwanda. The gig (shared) requires 40-80 MHz more spectrum than most of today's LTE, which I believe many other telcos have or will soon acquire. (I don't know enough about spectrum holdings outside the U.S. to be more specific. Data very welcome.)

Qualcomm's X16 LTE modem is now sampling and Basil El-Kadi tells me they expect commercial devices before yearend. SKT didn't announce their suppliers, but I believe Qualcomm is ahead of everyone else. To get to a gig, LTE-A features:

More bandwidth, 60-100 MHz in total (Carrier aggregation)
More antennas, 4x4 and 8x8 MIMO
More bits per signal, 256 QAM

Tony Werner: In 12 months, Comcast will offer a gigabit coast-to-coast

"Gigabit without a backhoe. ... We don't have to dig up the streets and can go incredibly fast. You're going to see us go coast-to-coast in the next 12 months," Comcast CTO Tony Werner tells Amy Maclean in a short but important interview. I'm told there are unannounced Comcast deployments of DOCSIS 3.1 in Chicago and California, as well as the large public trial in Atlanta. I'm guessing that Comcast has already upgraded the CMTS for millions of lines, ready to turn on large systems when they believe everything is ready. (That's consistent with what manufacturers are shipping but I don't have confirmation.)

Cable supplier Arris expects substantial sales of DOCSIS 3.1 modems starting early next year, which is consistent with Tony's prediction. Note that the high speeds are likely to be download only. Upload looks mostly to be 90% slower.

Hedge fund billionaire Paulson backing Chicago AT&T competitor Layer3

chiraq Drahi's Altice also is financing Layer3. They are offering a 4K set top with up to three terabytes, apparently designed to connect wirelessly to a simple network interface device. That avoids needing to wire in the home, which Fran Shammo says is often the largest cost in a Fios connection. They are about to launch in a Chicago neighborhood and are also hiring installers in Alexandria, Virginia.

Cable tech legend Dave Fellows and partner Jeff Binder have raised $100M, hoping that Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T have loads of unhappy customers who will switch. Paulson is a gambler who made $4B betting that triple-A rated mortgage bonds would default in 2008.

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