Zhone dives into the PON

Zhone Technologies today joined virtually every other vendor in the digital loop carrier market by unveiling its strategy for migrating to a passive optical network.

Coming in the package of a line card that is added to the company’s DLC product, the Multiple Access Line Concentrator represents a new configuration geared specifically to the independent telco market.

“If you look at most of the deployments, it’s municipalities right now,” said David Markowitz, vice president of marketing for Zhone. “The first movers [in the telco market] are going to be the IOCs.”

Zhone also has developed a residential gateway that serves as the ONT/ONU. The gateway itself can sit on either side of the subscriber demarc point and provide up to four POTS voice ports, fast Ethernet and RF video over the subscriber's existing inside wiring. The conversion to RF video also eliminates the need for a set-top box.

For enterprise subscribers, the company has created a specific jack to serve as both a demarc point and a test access point. Dubbed FiberJack, the unit connects directly to customer premises equipment and avoids forcing users to dump much of their legacy equipment.

“A lot of companies are saying that you have to swap equipment,” said Markowitz. “That type of business plan usually doesn’t fly.”

Like most vendors, Zhone is counting on video as the main driver behind IOC’s decision to move to a PON architecture. To that end, the company has teamed with Minerva for head-end equipment, as well as middleware vendor Myrio and compression specialist VideoTel.com. Though not suffering from the same drastic line losses as the Bell companies, IOCs are facing significant erosion in their core voice markets from technology substitution and loss of second-line revenue.

Zhone faces off against plenty of competition including AFC, which has a significant embedded base to build on, and Alcatel, which is on the short list of vendors for the big Bell company fiber-to-the-premises contract.

While acknowledging the competition, Markowitz said Alcatel’s solution would be a more difficult sell to IOCs because it doesn’t scale down to small line sizes and AFC’s solution is using older technology that was not designed specifically for PON architectures.