What do market leaders do better than others? Several things, no doubt, but one of them is that they keep pushing boundaries.

INEA is such a leader. They already provide the fastest broadband services in Poland and are one of only a handful or European operators offering 10 Gb/s services. Now they’ve upped the game again by being the first in Europe and one of the first in the world to test 25G PON with Nokia.

As INEA CEO, Michał Bartkowiak, said: “It is important to explore the new technologies, understand and look for the real-life use cases, because it's called innovation. The results of our 25G PON test clearly show the advantage of fiber over other broadband technologies, including HFC or radio. Importantly, FTTH technology is available commercially here and now.”

We in Nokia are proud that our latest innovation, 25G symmetrical PON, will help operators, their customers and their clients to benefit from the fastest PON technology. And it gets even better! We have made 25G PON available on our existing fiber access nodes and line cards, so all our customers who deploy 10Gb/s capable Quillion fiber cards today are also 25G PON ready!

25G PON technology is the best next step in PON evolution. It provides the right performance at the right cost as it leverages the high volumes and mature eco-system of data center optical technologies. It is simple to introduce, because it can co-exist with the current generation GPON and XGS-PON technologies, so it can be deployed in overlay without disrupting the existing customers. This will allow CSPs to add 25G PON quickly and efficiently when and where needed and capitalize on new opportunities. These opportunities are concrete and urgent: 5G transport and premium enterprise services with true 10Gb/s and higher.

Operators and industry vendors widely recognize the need to advance PON networks beyond 10Gb/s speeds, to meet the demand for 5G mobile transport and premium enterprise services. This recently led to the creation of the 25GS-PON MSA Group, a coalition of CSPs, system vendors, and chipset and optical component manufacturers, to accelerate the standardization and availability of 25G PON.

Fiber broadband has never been more important, and 25G PON is another step forward to the fiber future. It has a key role to play in connecting consumers, businesses and accelerating 5G, while having the lowest OPEX and smallest carbon footprint. It’s crucial that we keep innovating and evolving fiber networks to make them faster, smarter and increasingly efficient. Together with leaders like INEA, that’s exactly what we intend to do.