Orange tests Romania’s first 50G PON fiber connection

Orange Romania announced that it tested 50G PON fiber-optic technology for the first time in the country at its 5G Lab in Bucharest. The proof of concept explored potential uses ranging from 8K and 16K streaming to cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and industrial applications.

50G PON is the generation of fiber data transmission technology that follows XGS-PON, the 10 Gbps standard currently in use. It can deliver speeds of up to 50 Gbps.

During the test, Orange recorded download and upload speeds of approximately 40 Gbps on a single fiber connected to one computer. Latency remained below one millisecond.

“The first test of 50G PON technology in Romania represents an important new step in increasing digitalization in our country,” said Marius Maican, technology director at Orange Romania.

“At first glance, it may seem to be just a speed upgrade, but it is a technology that will make an important leap in what is already shaping up to be the next industrial revolution, driven by artificial intelligence and our continuously evolving digital lives.”

The technology can operate on the same fiber as existing GPON and XGS-PON systems, using separate wavelengths. This means customers could be transferred to 50G PON without installing a new fiber-optic cable or affecting neighboring users who remain on older technologies.

The equipment tested by Orange supports all three generations through the same port and can connect up to 128 customers on one fiber.

Potential applications include remote television and video production, high-speed links between company servers and cloud platforms, cloud gaming, Wi-Fi 7 and 8 networks, mobile network infrastructure, and critical industrial systems.

Orange said that, at 40 Gbps, a one-terabyte file could be transferred in about five minutes, compared with approximately one hour over a 2 Gbps connection.

The company also tested remote video editing, cloud storage used as a local disk, large file transfers, and AI models downloaded from the cloud and operated on local servers.

The trials took place at the Orange 5G Lab within Politehnica Bucharest’s CAMPUS Research Center, with support from Orange specialists and researchers from the Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications, and Information Technology.

Orange currently provides residential fiber connections of up to 2.1 Gbps and business services of up to 10 Gbps in Romania. The company has more than 11 million local customers and reported investments totaling EUR 4.7 billion in the country since entering the market.