While the US and EU are struggling to bring 5G and 100Mbps internet to their citizens over the next five years, South Korea is striving to bring 1Gbps speeds to all households by the turn of the decade. And as part of that effort, Nokia and a South Korean ISP have now achieved impressive results, bringing 52Gbps speeds to an apartment building.
Having a fiber connection to your home (FTTH) is becoming a bit more common nowadays, and it can allow for vastly improved internet speeds over traditional systems. But that system quickly becomes complicated and expensive when you need to wire up a whole block and still keep up service quality. It’s one of the main problems in democratizing super-fast internet connections.
However, a partnership between Nokia and SK Broadband has proved that an economically-viable solution exists. The South Korean ISP used Nokia’s “universal next generation passive optical network solution” and was able to implement multiple types of technologies on the same fiber optic infrastructure. This led to impressive speed improvements from 2.5Gbps up to 52Gbps.
What’s really important here is that all of this happened without new fiber being installed. This means that existing infrastructure can be upgraded to support vastly improved speeds, in an economically viable way.
To be clear, not everyone will be getting 52Gbps speeds, but this solution does mean that gigabit internet connections may soon become much more common, at least in some parts of the world.