---
title: Orange Romania tests 50G PON in its 5G lab - Developing Telecoms
description: Orange Romania says it has tested 50G PON technology for the first time in its 5G Lab in Bucharest, achieving symmetrical data speeds of around 40 Gbps and latency below 1 millisecond on a single fibre.
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Orange Romania says it has tested 50G PON technology for the first time in its 5G Lab in Bucharest, achieving symmetrical data speeds of around 40 Gbps and latency below 1 millisecond on a single fibre.

In a statement released on Thursday, Orange Romania said the speeds enabled by 50G PON open up new revenue and service opportunities for residential and business broadband customers. Possibilities include 8K/16K video streaming, Wi-Fi 7/8 networks, virtual reality, remote TV production and cloud gaming, as well as improved support for SaaS platforms , cloud computing and applications that require large volumes of data, such as AI.

“At first glance it seems to be just a speed upgrade, but it is a technology that will make an important leap in what is already shaping up as the next industrial revolution, driven by Artificial Intelligence and our ever-evolving digital lives,” said Marius Maican, technology director at Orange Romania.

Maican noted that another advantage of 50 PON is that it can operate on the same fibre as earlier-generation technologies like GPON and XGS-PON, each on a different wavelength. That means, for example, a customer could be migrated to 50G PON without havin g to install a new fiber optic cable, while neighbors on GPON or XGS-PON won’t experience a drop in data speeds or QoS.

Orange 5G Lab said the equipment it tested supports all three generations of technology on the same port, which allows up to 128 customers on a single fiber.

In addition to speed tests, Orange 5G Lab also simulated various usage scenarios for 50G PON, such as remote video editing (files located on a cloud server), storage space on a server used as a local disk, very large file transfers and AI models downloaded from the cloud and run on local servers.

Maican said Orange Romania will continue to test 50G PON, but gave no timeline for commercial deployment.