Zhone GPON, pseudowire gear coming

Zhone Technologies is planning to introduce new products in the next few months related to gigabit passive optical networking (GPON) and pseudowires, chief executive officer Mory Ejabat said at an investor conference this week.

“We have focused on next-generation technologies like GPON and pseudowire,” he said. “We’ll probably announce some products late this quarter or early next to address those needs and penetrate more market areas.”

Ejabat called GPON, along with active Ethernet access, “the technology of choice in the next few years.” Zhone introduced active Ethernet fiber-to-the-premises gear in May 2006. And in fact, Ejabat has promised GPON gear before. In December 2005 he toldTelephony, “We have a product that is a BPON and in the next few months will be GPON.”

Last May chip vendor Broadlight named Zhone a customer of its GPON chip set. And among the products displayed on Zhone's Web site is a GPON-based optical line terminal card for the vendor's MALC broadband loop carrier.

Pseudowire technology allows carriers to send frame relay, ATM and other types of legacy and circuit-based traffic as packets over IP and Ethernet networks while emulating their native form. The technology has proven itself useful in enterprise and DSL applications, and its use in wireless backhaul is growing. Zhone plans to add the technology to its next-generation platform on a new blade--a hardware innovation from a company whose software engineers outnumber its hardware engineers four to one.

Ironically, giving customers a variety of technologies to choose from is part of what Zhone blames for the 20% sequential revenue decline the vendor saw in last year’s third quarter (when revenue was, nonetheless, up 6% from a year earlier). Some carriers in the Middle East and Eastern Europe put their purchasing and deployment plans on hold to further evaluate their technology options, Ejabat said.

“Manufacturers like us, we confuse our customers a lot by providing lots of technologies,” he said. “They used to use DSL and ADSL. Now we start offering VDSL, PON, GPON, active Ethernet and [Ethernet First Mile]. We put it all in front of them and said, ‘Which one do you want?’ Some of them said, ‘We’re going to stop and decide which one we want.’”