Huawei showed prototype equipment to support 50G PON fiber technology – which will be important for 5G transport networks – at Mobile World Congress. Work started on standards for 50Gbps passive optical network (PON) a year ago in the ITU-T group, and should be completed in 2020, but mainstream commercial products had not been expected until 2023. The Chinese company may be shortening that timescale, partly in response to the needs of 5G. This is not just about the increased bandwidth requirements of future networks, which will put strain on existing backhaul and fronthaul solutions, but about the need to support a wide variety of network behaviors and use cases, which will need an agile, software-defined transport system. With 50G…