Nokia lab powers the future of PON, FWA

Before it was torn down and transformed into yet another Starbucks, an Alcatel-Lucent lab in midtown Raleigh, North Carolina, was where Nokia's David Eckard and his team worked on the initial iterations of broadband, PON and fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) technologies. Eckard's team was relegated to the loading dock while peers in the main building focused on DSL. But as is the case in the telecom and tech industries, quite a few great ideas have grown out of garages.

Eckard, Nokia's VP of strategy and technology for North America, sat down with Light Reading after he and his colleagues – Leopold Diouf, VP and general manager of broadband device unit, and Suresh Chandrasekaran, fixed NW customer engineer – provided a tour of the equipment maker's "new" broadband lab in Raleigh (located near Crabtree Valley Mall for those familiar with the Raleigh area). Eckard joined Nokia after more than a decade with Alcatel-Lucent, which was acquired by Nokia in 2016.

In the podcast Eckard discusses Nokia's approach to 25G PON, beacon devices for mesh Wi-Fi home networks, fixed wireless access (FWA) technologies and more. Nokia has over 150 FWA customer trials with more than two dozen operators deploying 5G FWA platform around the world, he says.

Here are highlights covered in this podcast episode:

• Short history on Alcatel-Lucent lab and FTTH developments (1:54)
• Overview of software and product development of Nokia's lab (04:23)
• Nokia's transition to deploying virtualization and software-defined access networks (06:16)
• Customer demos at the lab to test PON and access networks (07:40)
• Challenge in working with customers on both legacy and new equipment (09:47)
• The future of PON technology (11:07)
• Use cases for FWA (13:54)
• Nokia's plans for use of the US infrastructure fund (18:35)

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