With the short dictionary of the technologies used by Free, this is an opportunity to deepen your knowledge of the world of telecoms and, by extension, of new technologies.Today let's talk about 10G-EPON technology.In December 2018, Free announced the Freebox Delta, its new high-end box.Xavier Niel's operator then highlighted 10G-EPON connectivity through the server part, the box through which the subscriber is connected to his line.What is it ?The PON architecture, for Passive Optical Network, designates a network architecture used in optical fiber where the available bit rate is shared between the different subscribers and thus variable according to their number (32, 64, 128).It is the opposite of a P2P architecture, for Point-to-Point, where each subscriber has his own fiber optic link and a constant speed.10G indicates for its part that the theoretical maximum speed on this link can reach 10 Gbit/s.On paper, and if we only consider the last segment of the link, the P2P architecture then appears more interesting than the PON architecture.In fact, we are only talking here about the link between the optical connection node, more commonly called NRO, and the optical termination sockets of the various connected households/customers.However, in practice, it is not at this level that saturation is observed and that the speed available to the subscriber drops, for example in the evening, but rather upstream of the NRO, at the level of the collection point.Not to mention a significant advantage of the PON architecture, namely lower costs.This can be explained in particular by the greater number of subscribers connected to the NRO with the same link, which mechanically increases the density of subscribers at the level of the NRO.This cost issue also explains why operators offer asymmetric speeds (different speeds in downlink and uplink), while P2P / PON technologies allow symmetric speeds (same speeds in both directions).