Bi-PON Technology Cuts Ten Times Normal Fiber-to-the-Home Power Consumption

By Jacqueline Lee
Contributing Writer

Imagine a new data processing protocol that improves power consumption of information and communications networks so much that the power saved is the equivalent of taking half a million cars off of the road. No, this isn’t science fiction or a farfetched ‘go green’ initiative. This is a new technology – called Bi-PON, just announced by the GreenTouch Consortium.

Analysts expect fiber-in-the-home to grow to over 142 million subscribers over the next five years, nearly double the current number. Within optical network units (ONU), current energy consumption is increasing dramatically with network speed. By simplifying circuitry and making data flow more efficient, Bi-PON cuts power from an average of two watts to 200 microwatts.

The process is energy-intensive, with up to 99 percent of data dropped, as it is intended for other ONUs on the PON.

With Bi-PON, every ONU still receives every bit of data. But the ONU can determine which bits are intended for different ONUs, and can drop them before the bits undergo heavy, energy-intensive processing. This change results in the tenfold reduction in power consumption.

Power consumption is now proportional to the number of bits the user consumes, instead of the full incoming PON line rate. Because the data flowing in processing blocks matches the outgoing rate, required buffer memory is eliminated or significantly reduced. This “just-in-time” data processing causes an additional reduction in power consumption.

GreenTouch will showcase the new technology in a live webinar, concurrently available as a podcast.

“Implementing Bi-PON over current technologies will have the energy savings equivalent to the carbon impact of permanently taking all the cars in a city like San Francisco off the road,” said Gee Rittenhouse, chairman of GreenTouch. “We are making great progress toward our goal and are planning to make advances like this across all of our 25 research projects that are currently underway.”

GreenTouch is a consortium, dedicated to improving the energy efficiency of information and communications technology networks by a factor of 1,000. Bit-Interleaved Passive Optical Network is the second major new technology released by the consortium en route to its goal.

Edited by Braden Becker
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