Fiber optic connections such as KPN, Delta and Open Dutch Fiber have been fiber optic in the Netherlands for several years. This means that more and more Dutch people can buy 1 Gb/s fibre, as well as a 1 Gb/s cable subscription via Ziggo. However, KPN made a surprise announcement last fall; The provider will be the first national provider to offer 4 Gb/s fibre. This subscription will not be immediately available to all customers, but only to households connected in 2021 or later.

This announcement turned out to be the start of a mini-race. A day later, Delta announced that it would offer a 5 Gbps Internet subscription. This will also be available earlier than the KPN alternative and is now available to all Delta Fiber customers. At the end of November, Odido came in superlative. This provider made an 8 Gb/s subscription available to “a large proportion of Dutch households”. We’ve previously written about the home appliances required for such multiple subscriptions; In this article we take a look at why multigig exists now and what the future of fiber optics is.

*This subscription can only be ordered with a mobile subscription with an unlimited data package.
**At Odido, the price depends on the customer’s internet connection.

Passive optical networks

To understand how national providers can offer faster internet subscriptions, we must first explain how fiber currently works in the Netherlands. It uses KPN, Delta, and ODF pon, which is short for Passive optical network. A number of households share one fiber optic cable. By working with different time slots and/or wavelengths, it is possible to serve multiple households with a single fiber optic cable.

Service providers use OLTs for this purpose, Optical line stations,ont, Optical network stations. For example, an OLT is located in a provider’s distribution box and splits the signal in the cable into different time windows and wavelengths for different customers on the fiber optic cable. The receptionist sits in a customer’s home, knows the signal assigned to that customer, and passes that signal to the modem router located in the meter cabinet. det ignores the rest of the encrypted signals intended for other clients.

OLTs and ONTs can handle certain network standards, such as GPON, which allows symmetrical speeds of up to 1 Gbit/s. This PON technology is constantly being improved. Consider additional supported wavelengths and efficiency gains, resulting in increasingly better use of fiber optic cables. These improvements are combined into new standards. The successor to the GPON standard is XGS-PON, where X is the Roman letter meaning “ten”.

Thanks to XGS-PON technology, fiber providers can offer increased subscriptions, as 8 Gb/s seems to be the current maximum. Eight is of course less than ten in XGS-PON; You have Boone techniques Indirect costs, such as font pinning, which prevents the full “X” from being used for a data connection. As a result, as a customer, you will see just over 8 Gbps maximum speed in Speedtest and other speed meters in XGS-PON.

XGS-PON has been in the network for years

Once a customer’s OLT and ONT are suitable for a particular PON technology, you can in principle deliver increased speeds on that part of the network. However, you see that service providers wait before offering increased speeds. Take KPN; Customers have been provided with XGS-PON fiber connections since 2021, but it took two years before they could actually purchase XGS-PON subscriptions.

This has several reasons. In addition to OLT and ONT, the rest of the provider’s network must also be able to handle the higher speeds. For example, consider additional network capacity in the provider’s core network. Additionally, there must be enough modem routers for customers to handle those increased speeds at reasonable prices. In line with this, it is beneficial for the customer to have sufficient home devices to take advantage of the increased speeds. Otherwise, demand would be almost non-existent, so it doesn’t make sense for the provider to offer these increased speeds. However, as far as home appliances go, it’s still somewhat disappointing, as noted in our previous article about multiple speeds.

Once a fiber optic connection such as KPN, ODF, and Delta activates a particular PON technology, virtual providers on that network can also offer the increased speeds. These virtual service providers can install the devices themselves at the distribution (base) stations of a fiber optic network, allowing them to provide faster Internet services from the network supplier. For example, Odido requires Tweakers to install the equipment itself in certain parts of KPN’s network, allowing it to offer 8Gb/s services in places where KPN customers can “only” purchase 4Gb/s subscriptions. Thus an 8Gbit/s subscription can be ordered from Odido on the XGS-PON network of KPN, ODF and Primest. Odido isn’t the only virtual provider offering multi-network subscriptions. For example, TriNed offers a 2.5 Gbps subscription for €54 per month on the ODF network.

The question remains whether the customer is really waiting for multi-gigabit fiber. 1 Gb/s Internet continues to play a relatively small role, with a market share of 5.4 percent. Multigig won’t be much higher than that. Fast subscriptions are still much higher than slower subscriptions. The majority of services cannot utilize their full potential and the hardware required remains expensive, both in terms of cost and power consumption.

20 Gbit/s and beyond

However, 8 Gb/s Internet speed will soon become commonplace, just as 1 Gb/s was once very special, but is now available almost everywhere and its market share is growing. So XGS-PON will not be the end of optical fiber. In fact, the International Telecommunication Union, usually responsible for standardizing PON technologies, Now working on 50G-PONSo the internet is 40 Gb/s. However, service providers and network companies find the jump from XGS-PON to 50GS-PON too big. Therefore we are working on an intermediate step: 25GS-PON.

It is known in the Netherlands that KPN is trialling 25GS-PON. At the end of last year, the company indicated that it expects XGS-PON to be sufficient for consumer communications until 2028, and only then are the first KPN internet subscriptions faster than 8 Gb/s likely to become available. This is due to the fact that the intended devices are still in beta and have little demand among customers. KPN said at the time that companies would first be eligible for the 25GS-PON.

Delta, which is the largest fiber network in the Netherlands after KPN as well Speaking of 25GS-PON. Just like XGS-PON, this PON technology requires upgrading OLTs and ONTs, but no new cabling is required on the street. This makes it a relatively simple upgrade. Moreover, customer terminals do not need to be upgraded if these customers do not want to subscribe to XGS or 25GS-PON. So, for example, it is not the case that because one customer on a fiber line wants an 8 Gb/s subscription, while the rest of the customers are satisfied with 1 Gb/s or less, then all ONTs on the fiber line must be able to Handling of XGS-PON. XGS-PON enhancements are based on the GPON standard, allowing GPON ONTs to filter the GPON signal from the fiber optic cable. Customers with an 8 Gb/s subscription must have an XGS-PON receiver in order to receive the XGS-PON signal.

Does Ziggo’s cable network still have a future?

In addition to different XGS-PON technologies, we should talk about Docsis in this article. This provides Internet connections via Ziggo coaxial cables. Ziggo’s maximum internet speed is currently only 1 Gb/s, which is about download speed. Unlike optical fibers, the axial velocities are not symmetrical; Upload does not exceed 100 Mbit/s for cable consumer subscriptions.

The Ziggo network runs with Docsis 3.1, which theoretically allows for download speeds of 10 Gbit/s and upload speeds of 1.5 Gbit/s. However, this is only the case if the provider can use the full internet bandwidth, which Ziggo cannot do. After all, in addition to the Internet, this provider also offers television services that consume part of the bandwidth. Earlier this year, the provider told Tweakers that at the time “almost all customers had enough capacity to do what they wanted to do.” The provider noted that it will be able to offer internet services at “10 Gb/s speed” with Docsis 4.0. This also requires new modems and other network modifications. The company has hinted that it could offer the first Docsis 4.0 services in 2024.

Even then, Ziggo is not the provider for users who want the fastest speeds. According to some, this wasn’t really the case, given the limited download speed. The company may be able to better compete with fiber providers later this year. The future after Docsis 4.0 is less clear. An improved Docsis version is in the works, with 25Gb/s mentioned as a possibility, but there’s no concrete roadmap yet. So there is still some scope and future in Docsis. However, the fact that testing has already been done with the 25GS-PON while the Docsis equivalent has not yet been announced is not a good sign for Ziggo customers. Furthermore, the question remains when Docsis will truly reach the limits of coaxial cable and when Ziggo will be forced to switch to fiber if it wants to continue competing on speed. It seems that that moment has not yet arrived in the current decade.

What we will see in the current decade is XGS-PON being increasingly embraced. Last fall we saw for the first time in the Netherlands that a major provider was using the full potential of the existing fiber network. Interestingly, it is not Delta or KPN that offer the fastest speeds, while they are the only Dutch fiber providers with their own network. Odido now offers the fastest internet subscriptions. Delta and KPN will apparently also offer 8Gb/s services in the long term. The question now is when and what does this have to do with: why? Of course, there are customers who want and can use 8 Gb/s, but GPON speeds are adequate for an average household. The amount of equipment available that can handle multi-network Internet is still limited. In addition, not all services can use such high Internet speeds. So Ziggo cable network is not out of date yet when it comes to download speeds and prospects. The future lies in XGS-PON and multi-network Internet, that’s for sure, but GPON and Docsis subscribers don’t have to switch right away.

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