- GFiber is rolling out a new, more compact 20-gig ONT
- Bulky equipment has been a big barrier for consumer adoption, said GFiber Head of Product Nick Saporito
- But he doesn’t think everybody needs 20-gig – at least for now
GFiber has been in the 20-gig game for a while, but equipment has been a big barrier to widespread adoption. That’s about to change, GFiber Head of Product Nick Saporito told Fierce.
The company announced last week it began rolling out a new-and-improved optical network terminal (ONT) device for its symmetrical 20-gig service. GFiber said about 90% of the homes and businesses in its footprint are already “20-gig capable,” it’s just a matter of getting that device to them.
“The gating factor to scaling that has always been the equipment side,” said Saporito, noting the first iteration of GFiber’s ONT was “literally a one RU rack mount” device. In other words, big and clunky.
“Most consumers don’t really want rack mount equipment in their home,” he said. That’s why the 20-gig service only got traction from the “really tech-savvy customers.”
The new ONT, built by Nokia, is three times smaller than the last version. Not only is the hardware smaller, but “you don’t have to mount it,” Saporito added. The device can also "sit on a desktop," making it easier to install.
GFiber has partnered with Nokia for some time on the access front. The operator started using Nokia’s 25G PON technology in 2023, and the two are also working together on network slicing and 50G trials.
Commercial 20-gig and higher deployments are limited thus far. Apart from GFiber, notable operators that offer these speeds are Chattanooga-based EPB, which launched citywide 25-gig in 2022, and Ziply, which jumped straight from 10-gig to 50-gig.
One of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of broader 20-gig adoption, according to Saporito, is that while access network technology is advancing, customer premise equipment (CPE) has catching up to do.
“We have the 20-gig pipe that’s very straightforward, easy for us to do,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean operators have access to a consumer-grade router that can handle 20-gig, he said.
The cable industry is in a similar boat with DOCSIS 4.0 adoption, where the access technology has advanced but operators and vendors still have work to do in upgrading their gear, Harmonic’s Asaf Matatyaou told Fierce in September.
In the case of 20-gig, the CPE vendors are “going through their investment cycles,” said Saporito. “They’re working on [the devices] right now. It’s just their timing didn’t necessarily align with the access vendors.”
Do people really need 20-gig?
With all the bells and whistles around 20-gig, we can’t help but wonder if the average home broadband user needs that much speed.
The short answer is no, not yet, according to Saporito.
“Not everybody needs 20-gig today, I will say that,” he said. “But there are customers, and we have them already.”
For example, G-Fiber has one customer who posts Linux updates in their home server, while others are doing work with AI or are engineers “who have to work in a cloud environment constantly.”
“I would say they’re sort of the beacons of what’s to come in many regards in our industry,” Saporito said.
While he thinks most consumers won’t gravitate toward 20-gig, Saporito believes multi-gig connectivity as a whole is the future.
“From a GFiber perspective, we’re already at a point where a good chunk of consumers would benefit from multi-gig service,” he said, especially as simultaneous device usage ramps.
OpenVault’s Q3 broadband report indicates high data usage is becoming more normalized. The firm found the growth rate of “Super Power Users” (those who consume 2 TB or more per month) increased by 22.5% from Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 – a slight drop from 24.6% in the prior year.
“This slowing of the growth curve may be due to the fact that the underlying base of heavy-usage households is now materially larger than in prior years,” OpenVault wrote.