Elisa claims Euro first with 100G PON trial over live Nokia-based fibre net

Finland’s leading comms and digital services provider Elisa has deployed a Nokia fibre infrastructure solution to become the first European operator to demonstrate up to 100Gbps broadband speeds over a live commercial network.

The trial deployment has seen Elisa install Nokia’s Lightspan MF solution to enhance its existing fibre network and deliver new ultra-broadband services to customers across the large and varied geography of Finland.

It builds on Elisa’s current fibre deployment and is said to demonstrate how different passive optical network (PON) technologies can be combined on the same fibre to evolve its broadband offerings, showing how operators can easily upgrade their fibre network to meet the demand for faster, more reliable connectivity

By using its fibre solution, Nokia says Elisa will be the first service provider in Europe to demonstrate 25G, 50G, and 100G PON services, highlighting the superior broadband speeds it can deliver across its existing fibre network. The tech firm noted that it was the only vendor that supports all next-generation PON options, including 10G, 25G, 50G and future 100G PON technologies.

Nokia claims that the Lightspan broadband access platform will enable Elisa to deliver some of the fastest broadband speeds in Europe, indeed up to 10 times faster than most fibre networks can currently deliver.

Elisa has also deployed Nokia’s Altiplano platform to support 10G XGS-PON deployments and to help automate and improve the management, scalability and reliability of its network.  

This technology is regarded by Nokia as enabling Elisa to meet the bandwidth demands of the future, driven by artificial intelligence (AI), where Bell Labs – the research division of Nokia – is forecasting that by 2030 total AI traffic on networks will reach 91 EB/month in Western Europe alone.

Commenting on the trial and the scale of the operator’s future ambitions, Sami Rajamäki, Elisa’s vice-president of network services, expected the Nokia’s fibre solution to help it “significantly” enhance its fibre network to deliver some of the fastest internet speeds in the world.

“We’re excited to be the first in Europe to show up to 100G PON speeds in a live fibre network trial and demonstrate the world-class capabilities we can deliver to support the next generation of broadband services,” he said.

“By partnering with Nokia, we can showcase our commitment to guaranteeing the best, high-quality services for our customers. History has shown that it is impossible to forecast all the new use cases for greater speeds – what new 25G to 100G connections will enable in the future – but we know that online gaming and industrial users are among the first to benefit from ever faster broadband connections, for example.”

Matthieu Bourguignon, senior vice-president and head of Europe for network infrastructure business at Nokia, added: “We see demand for high-speed internet access surging in Europe with end users and enterprises alike increasingly seeking reliable, secure, high-quality broadband connectivity. Our fibre technology provides the perfect solution for operators that want to quickly increase capacity and flexibly migrate to next-generation fibre technologies.”