New Zealand could soon get 25 Gbps home fibre

Chorus and Nokia have announced the first successful demonstration of 25 Gbps fibre.

The demonstration took place at Chorus’ Fibre Lab in Auckland, reaching download speeds of 21.4 Gbps.

“While not yet commercially available, large businesses are expected to see great benefit from the increased speeds and capacity for their growing low latency cloud connectivity, IoT and industrial metaverse applications,” the company stated.

The test was conducted on Chorus’ existing passive optical fire (PON) network while simultaneously running an 8 Gbps symmetrical connection and a 900/550 Mbps Ultrafast Broadband link — a technology Chorus calls “Hyperfibre”.

“For Chorus, what’s truly outstanding about 25G PON is the ease with which it will integrate with our existing fibre infrastructure, enabling service providers to upgrade their customers on demand,” Chorus chief technology officer Ewan Powell said.

In 2020, Chorus launched Hyperfibre using Nokia’s XGS-PON technology, providing 8 Gbps fibre connections to New Zealand residents.

The new 25 Gbps service uses a single wavelength, with the demo connection using 1358 nanometers for the downstream and supporting three options ranging between 1286 to 1300 nanometers for the upstream.

These three options allow other services, like the 8 Gbps connection, to run over the same fibre pair as the 25 Gbps service.

Main Image: Glimp