OKI Develops World’s First 160Gbps Ultra High-speed Optical Next Generation Access Asymmetric PON System

TOKYO, OKI Electric Industry (TSE: 6703) today announced it has succeeded in developing the World’s first 160Gbps ultra high-speed optical next generation access (NGA) asymmetric PON system using hybrid Optical Time Division Multiplexing (OTDM) and Optical Code Division Multiplexing (OCDM)(*1). 160Gbps is equivalent to sending 6 channels of uncompressed ultra high-definition video or 33 channels of high-definition video per second. Transmitting signals at a speed of 160Gbps on a single optical fiber downstream means super high-resolution and high quality video delivery service that requires data of over 1GB, such as movie distribution and telemedicine, can be offered.

The research that led to OKI’s achievement was conducted as part of the “Research and development for ultra high-speed optical NGA Asymmetric PON system,” under the auspices of NICT’s(*2) “Basic Technology Promotion System for Private Sectors Program.”

The mainstream optical access systems used by carriers today are GE-PON system (1.25Gbps) in Japan and G-PON system in US and Europe (2.5Gbps), which are used mainly to transmit data and video. In such optical access systems, the communication capacity per user when 16 users are connected, is limited to 78 to 156Mbps.

The ultra high-speed NGA Asymmetric PON system developed by OKI significantly increases the communication capacity compared to conventional optical access systems. The system achieves 128-times larger capacity than that of GE-PON systems and 64-times larger capacity than G-PON systems. This means that with 16users, telecom carriers can offer a 10Gbps communication capacity for each user, enabling high-resolution and high quality video delivery service.

“We are excited to announce the development of the world’s first high-speed NGA Asymmetric PON system. With this system, OKI will contribute a valuable tool to industries that need to transmit high-quality videos, such as the movie and telemedicine industries, and plan to help rejuvenate the communication environment in local areas,” said Takeshi Kamijoh, General Manager of Corporate R&D Center at OKI. “With the market needs in mind, we will continue to make efforts to develop smaller and more stable equipment and continually improve the quality for optical access system over 100Gbps.”

Optical Line Terminal (OLT) is the main equipment for this system. After encoding the 10Gbps signals using a 16-chip code, and optically multiplexing them into a 25ps TDM slot, OKI quadrupled the signal with wavelength to output a multiplex signal of 10Gbps x 16 ch. OKI then transmitted this 160 Gbps signal over a 20km distance (the longest in an optical access system), divided the signal with a 1 x 16 splitter, extracted the signals from the Optical Network Unit (ONU) that decodes with sign preference, and finally succeeded in decoding a 10Gbps signal.

Though OKI multiplexed one code in a single TDM slot for this experiment, technically, the system can multiplex up to four codes in a single slot, thus transmitting four times the data (10Gbps x 64ch = 640Gbps). On the other hand, to use the wavelength resources more effectively a structure of 4 coding signals x 4 slots x 1 wavelength can also be achieved.