Starman, the largest cable operator in the Baltic States, plans to roll out a 10G EPON network to residential customers this year. Leveraging Nokia's (NYSE:NOK) EPON gear, the service provider will build an EPON network that will deliver broadband and triple-play services to residential customers in Estonia.
The network will be gradually rolled out in the fourth quarter of 2016 throughout Estonia following lab and field tests. Like other traditional cable MSOs, Starman is seeing more of its customers migrate away from broadcast to on-demand TV and video services, while internet traffic is growing about 50 percent year after year. Seeing these trends, Starman said it wanted to have a future-proof technology that will enable it to deliver 1 Gbps speeds to each customer in the near-term and up to 10 Gbps for customers that require such speeds.
Cable operators are looking at how to deploy deep fiber and FTTH as an alternative to upgrading their current DOCSIS 3.0 hybrid fiber coax (HFC) networks to 3.1, in order to meet subscriber demands. Starman chose Nokia's EPON solution because the MSO is able to reuse existing fiber ducts in the street and can leverage its in-house cabling rights to bring fiber to each apartment living unit. In addition, the solution supports DOCSIS provisioning over EPON (DPoE), which allows for a low-touch integration into the existing cable network and DOCSIS back-end office systems. Release