Orange Spain Picks ZTE to launch 10 Gbps XGS-PON

ZTE Corporation in partnership with Orange Spain, has planned to launch commercial 10-gigabit-capable symmetric passive optical network (XGS-PON) services in five Spanish cities: Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, Valencia and Zaragoza.

The services will provide users with 10 Gbps broadband and Wi-Fi experiences. It’s Orange’s first attempt at delivering 10 Gbps broadband to retail users.

In October 2021, Orange Spain demonstrated a live test of ZTE’s F8648P XGS-PON optical network terminal (ONT) on its network. The test result showed that the ONT achieved an uplink/downlink speed of 8.6 Gbps, close to the theoretical peak rate of XGS-PON.

Currently, ZTE ranks first globally in terms of market share in the customer premises equipment (CPE) segment. After multiple rounds of testing and evaluation, Orange Spain selected ZTE and its F8648P XGS-PON ONT.

ZTE’s ONT provides a 10 GE downlink port to meet users’ current and future high-speed access requirements. With its support for eight spatial streams and Wi-Fi 6 technology, the ONT enables up to 6 Gbps physical layer rates and a maximum of 128 end-user devices.

In addition, the ONT is compatible with legacy end-user devices to suit the in-home access scenario where multiple devices, both old and new, usually mix.

Spain was the first European country to roll out optical broadband and has made massive fiber to the home (FTTH) deployments. As the emergence of services including the metaverse and 8K ultra-high-definition video drives an increase in bandwidth demand, operators in other European countries have also begun to build FTTH networks.

According to a recent report by the research firm Omdia, the number of fiber to the x (FTTx) users in Europe would reach 96.4 million by end-2021 and grow to 154.01 million in 2026.

Moving forward, the commercial XGS-PON service deployed by Orange Spain, which ranks among the top 20 operators globally, will become a new benchmark in the industry that is of great significance for other operators in Europe seeking to implement fiber transformation of their networks.