Verizon said today it had conducted a successful trial of 10 gigabit per second connections on both the download side and on the upload side. The broadband provider has successfully tested 10 Gigabits per second down last December but was limited to 2.5 Gbps on the upload side, and we all know that symmetry is beautiful when we’re talking faces or broadband speeds. Plus at 10 Gbps you can upload HD movies in seconds rather than minutes. But these speeds aren’t really about consumer applications today, but more for shifting the terabytes of data businesses are aiming to analyze in the near future and for medical imaging and other high-bandwidth needs. Believe it or not, at the enterprise level we are creating more data than we can analyze and send across current networks.
Verizon is pioneering a new technology called XG-PON to make such speeds happen (in this case it’s XG-PON2). The trial was to a business customer in Tauton, Mass. and proved that the XG-PON technology would also work in conjunction with Verizon’s existing GPON network on the same fiber strands. An easy upgrade is vital for it ensures quick deployment of cutting edge technologies such as Verizon’s experimental network. Alcaltel-Lucent provided the gear for the test. At the customer’s end the trial supported up to 10 single Gigabit Ethernet links, as well as one dedicated link capable of delivering the full 10 Gbps symmetric speeds to a single location. Two PCs, each having a 10 Gbps network interface card, were communicating across the network between the customer’s on premise gear and the line terminal equipment located in the Verizon switching facility in Taunton. From the release:
The team tested the continuous transfer of 2 gigabyte files from 20 concurrent clients using a commercial Web-server application. The files were transferred both upstream and downstream, simulating what a business customer would experience when 20 employees are performing concurrent file transfers to and from remote locations. This test demonstrated an application layer throughput of 9.1Gbps, upstream and downstream. As part of the test, a 2.3 gigabyte movie took an average of just four seconds to download or upload and save to the computers. These download and upload speeds are close to 60 times faster than the maximum speeds capable with cable’s DOCSIS 3.0 technology and more than twenty thousand times faster than the average cable subscriber would experience. An additional test was done to transfer a 6.9 gigabyte medical image file in 11 seconds, demonstrating the potential time and cost savings available on an XG-PON network as collaborative medical work environments continue to evolve.
As we’ve said before, broadband speeds matter, and by providing more capacity and speeds Verizon is offering a platform that’s not only competitive to cable broadband for consumers, but will become a platform for innovation for businesses now operating in the “cloud.”
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