Nokia, Vodafone Conduct Trial Of L4S Technology Over End-to-end PON Network

(RTTNews) - Nokia and Vodafone have collaborated to test the viability of L4S technology over passive optical networks or PON, which could greatly improve the experience of residential customers engaged in everyday internet activities like video conferencing and gaming, Nokia said in a statement on Wednesday.

L4S stands for "Low Latency, Low Loss, and Scalable."

Nokia noted that its research arm Nokia Bell Labs and Vodafone's Fixed Access Center of Excellence recently performed the world's first demonstration of L4S running over PON in Vodafone's lab in Newbury, U.K. The demonstration was performed on an end-to-end fixed access network built with Nokia technology. It consisted of a broadband network gateway (BNG), a PON optical line terminal (OLT), multiple PON optical network terminals (ONTs) and WiFi access points.

According to the company, the tests showed extremely low and consistent end-to-end latencies when travelling across every element of the network.

Nokia noted that L4S networking technology consistently achieves near-zero packet queuing delay, no matter how much load the network experiences. By eliminating queuing delays, L4S removes big variations in latency without compromising network speeds.

In the lab tests, Vodafone and Nokia Bell Labs measured consistent latencies of 1.05ms at local Ethernet ports running over a fully congested access network (BNG to ONT), and just 12.1ms when including a fully congested WiFi link as the final connection.

The Vodafone and Nokia Bell Labs tests were conducted using PON networks. However, L4S can be implemented over any access technology, wireless or wireline, and applied to any latency-dependent application, Nokia said.