Greentech Lead Asia: GreenTouch, a consortium dedicated
to improving energy efficiency of ICT networks, will announce a new technology
that will reduce energy consumption in FTTH networks and other applications.
When deployed, the Bit-Interleaved Passive Optical
Network (Bi-PON) technology will enable a power reduction of 30 times over
current technologies while improving performance and reducing cost.
FTTH is expected to nearly double over the next five
years, reaching 142 million subscribers worldwide by 2016, according to ABI
Research.
The access network is a significant contributor to power
consumption of the communications infrastructure.
GreenTouch member companies imec, a research organization
in nano-electronics and nano-technology; INRIA, a French research body
dedicated to computational sciences; Orange Labs; and Bell Labs will
participate in today’s worldwide demonstration event.
The demonstration will show video traffic flowing through
two separate networks — a standard optical network and a Bi-PON-enabled one —
both attached to a power meter that will measure the energy consumption and
reveal the dramatic decrease in energy consumed in the Bi-PON over traditional
XGPON and XGPON operating in sleep mode.
“We are committed to reducing energy consumption
across all ICT networks and Bi-PON is a huge and critical step in helping us
achieve that goal. The impact is clear and wide-ranging including wireless
backhaul and fiber to the home. Implementing Bi-PON over current technologies
will have the energy savings equivalent to the carbon impact of permanently
taking all the cars in a city like San Francisco off the road. We are making
great progress toward our goal and are planning to make advances like this
across all of our 25 research projects that are currently underway,” said
Gee Rittenhouse, GreenTouch chairman.
GreenTouch claims that Bi-PON represents the next major
leap in passive optical network (PON) technologies. It is expected to be a
necessity as electronic processing will increase with future 40GPON systems.
Current optical network units in access discard 99
percent of all processed data, without ever being used, whereas Bi-PON is built
around a new protocol that significantly simplifies the electronic circuitry by
using a selective data processing technique that dramatically reduces this
energy consumption.