Orange is rolling out passive optical LANs (POL), supplied by Nokia, for an initial 20 sites in France, including the headquarters at Issy-les-Moulineaux, as it replaces legacy copper infrastructure serving over 5,000 end points, for WiFi as well as hard-wired terminals. The POL technology is a localized implementation of passive optical network (PON) fiber technology, which is used by many telcos for their external, customer-serving fiber networks, including Orange itself as a provider of fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) services. Such operators have also been considering use of PON for fronthaul and midhaul in emerging disaggregated 5G networks to meet the challenging requirements for both bit-rate and latency. The main benefits for Orange of this internal PON/POL deployment are higher performance,…