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Network access provider Openreach (BT) has published a new Suppliers Information Note (SIN) for their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP lines, which provides an updated summary of all their old, existing and future Optical Network Terminal (ONT) modems that they’ve deployed or intent to deploy. Two new suppliers – Zyxel and Sercomm – are also mentioned.
The ONT or optical modem device is usually installed inside your home or office (wall hung), near to where the fibre optic cable physically enters your property, and its primary job is simply to take the optical signal and convert it into an electrical one that can be connected to your broadband router via a Local Area Network (Ethernet) port.
The standard ONT is usually a very small single port device, but Openreach also offer Multi-Port variants. Most of these have, thus far, been designed to cope with Openreach’s existing Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) based network. But the new SIN 506B document lists newer models, which will also work alongside their latest 10Gbps capable XGS-PON technology (the ‘X’ stands for 10, the ‘G’ for Gigabits’ and the ‘S’ for Symmetric speed).
As we’ve previously reported (here), Openreach’s future XGS-PON trial appears to be gearing up to support symmetric speeds of up to 3.3Gbps (3,300Mbps), so it’s not surprising that they might need to support that with new ONTs from Nokia, Adtran, Sercomm (new supplier) and Zyxel (new supplier). But we should point out that most of the listed kit supports speeds of up to 1Gbps or 2.5Gbps (faster ONTs will come later). Check out the document for more details.
UPDATE 1:54pm
Thanks to one of our readers, nsmhd, for pointing out that the Nokia XS-010-X-Q and Adtran SDX-631 do support up to 10Gbps speeds. We didn’t spot that first time around because Openreach’s current document doesn’t include the full specifications for those two models.