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MaxLinear G.hn Technology Powers ZTE’s New Family of FTTH Fiber Extenders

Jul 15, 2019

MaxLinear, Inc. (NYSE: MXL), a leading provider of radio frequency (RF), analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits for the connected home, wired and wireless infrastructure, and industrial and multimarket applications, today announced that ZTE Strawcom Telecommunications Co., Ltd, a subsidiary of ZTE Corporation, has selected MaxLinear’s G.hn Wave-2 chipset to develop a new family of fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) fiber extenders designed to help service providers reduce the cost of deploying symmetric gigabit services to residential and business users by leveraging existing copper wires, including twisted pair and coaxial cables.
 
“As a leader in the broadband industry, we have shipped more than 330 million CPEs to carriers in more than 100 different countries. Our FTTH customers are often faced with the challenge of reaching potential broadband subscribers who live in homes or apartment buildings where installing fiber is not feasible or economical. Due to either cost, lack of space for fiber, or lack of permissions from building owners, sometimes installing a new fiber to the customer’s premises is not feasible. Our new generation of fiber extenders are designed to address this challenge, which affects up to 30% of target FTTH subscribers in certain regions,” said Haiwei Li, Sales Director at ZTE. “By reusing the existing copper infrastructure, carriers can now reach those difficult locations to deliver the same quality of service and speed as traditional fiber deployments.”
The new solution is composed of two devices, the ZXHN H182G single-port DPU (distribution point unit) and the ZXHN H581 CPE (customer premises equipment), that work together to provide a symmetric gigabit connection over existing twisted pair or coaxial cables.

  • The H182G single-port DPU provides an optical uplink (compatible with both EPON and GPON), a copper-based downlink (compatible with ITU-T Recommendations G.9960/G.9961) with options for coaxial or twisted pair, and two Gigabit Ethernet ports. The H182G can be either locally powered or reverse powered from customer premises, following the ETSI TS 101 548 standard. Options for both indoor and outdoor installations are available.
  • The H581 CPE provides a copper-based uplink (compatible with ITU-T Recommendations G.9960/G.9961) with options for coaxial or twisted pair and one Gigabit Ethernet port. Service providers can deploy the H581 CPE either as a standalone network termination device or in combination with ZTE’s portfolio of wireless home routers such as the ZXHN H159Q. This high-performance router provides 4x4 802.11ac at 5GHz plus a 3x3 802.11n at 2.4GHz for the best Wi-Fi experience.

 The ZTE fiber-extender solution integrates several features designed to provide the best user performance in the most challenging conditions:

  • Line rates up to 2Gbps with adaptive modulation and state of the art LDPC (low-density parity check) forward error correction ensure error-free operation over any type of wire, including old telephone lines that may be subject to ingress noise.
  • Advanced crosstalk management capabilities deal with both NEXT (near-end crosstalk) and FEXT (far-end crosstalk) in scenarios where multiple fiber extenders are deployed in the same apartment building. The solution, based on MaxLinear’s cloud-based VectorBoost™ architecture, can scale from single-port deployments to hundreds of lines in high-density MDUs.
  • Flexible bandwidth allocation capabilities support fixed upstream/downstream ratios or Collective Dynamic Time Allocation (cDTA) configurations.
  • AES-128 encryption to ensure maximum user privacy.

 
“With the increased demand for faster and more reliable broadband connections, it is critical to ensure that everyone can get access to gigabit-class broadband services regardless of where they live. For years, FTTH service providers have been unable to reach a significant percentage of users because bringing fiber to their homes was too expensive or impractical. Based on our G.hn technology, ZTE’s new fiber-extender solution will enable service providers worldwide to finally address 100% of their target customer base,” said Will Torgerson, Vice President & General Manager of the Broadband Group at MaxLinear.