Nortel this week unveiled a system for getting more bandwidth from fiber-optic lines that are run from service providers to individual homes and businesses.

The Ethernet access technology was developed by LG-Nortel, a joint venture of LG Electronics and Nortel Networks.

It uses Wave Division Multiplexing Passive Optical Network (WDM-PON). Wave division multiplexing allows more data to travel down an optical fiber by using different wavelengths of light to carry different signals.

You could give each home or business its own wavelength of light - and that way, the traffic going to each customer would not interfere with any others. There would be no part of that "first mile" broadband connection to the Internet that would be shared. This is how Nortel is suggesting its new offering be used by service providers.

Initial speeds for each customer would start at 100Mbps and could scale up in the future without changing the infrastructure, Nortel says. Interestingly, the rate is symmetrical - the upload and download speeds are the same. That means that applications like video calling are also possible.

Analysts say WDM-PON can serve up 10 to 20 times as much bandwidth to each location.

The company points to HD video-on-demand as a particularly bandwidth-hungry service that would be made possible by this shift in network architecture. In current architectures, the bandwidth sharing among customers means that large downloads can hold up other traffic.

Nortel also argues that the architecture is more secure because each user gets its own wavelength and traffic from different users is not mixed.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.