In a continued drive to virtualize access functions over its last mile network, AT&T announced Tuesday that it completed 10 Gbps XGS-PON field trials utilizing open-source software.
The trials, conducted in Atlanta and Dallas, relied on Open Source Access Manager Hardware Abstraction (OSAM-HA) software, formerly known as VOLTHA, which AT&T released in October.
At the time, AT&T called the open source software the “brain” for XGS-PON access technology.
XGS-PON is a fixed wavelength symmetrical 10 Gbps passive optical network technology that can reportedly coexist with current GPON technology and provide four times the existing downstream bandwidth. In the recent trials, AT&T said it used a coexistence element to allow the technology to work within existing GPON networks, and found that GPON and XGS wavelengths could both exist across a single fiber interface.
During the field trials, AT&T tested multi-gigabit, high-speed internet traffic and said the XGS-PON system provided trial participants with a “seamless AT&T DirecTV Now video experience.” A virtualized Broadband Network Gateway (BNG) function was used to manage subscribers.
“Our network is constantly evolving. We’ll continue to execute our software-based network strategy to technologies like 5G, virtualized RAN, and G.FAST over time,” Eddy Barker, assistant VP of Access Architecture and Design at AT&T, said in a statement. “Ultimately, instead of deploying islands of technology that have SDN control, we want to orchestrate the entire end-to-end network through ONAP.”
ONAP is a member community working on open-source platforms as part of a virtual access project within the Linux Foundation and spearheaded by AT&T. ONAP’s first platform release, ONAP Amsterdam, was unveiled in November.
AT&T said ONAP will use the first iteration of OSAM-HA technology, which is a vendor-agnostic operational suite aimed at managing consumer and business broadband access network elements and capabilities.
When the field trials were first announced last June, AT&T said its main goal was to support “the merging of all services on a single network, including 5G wireless infrastructure.”