Ikanos gets into FTTH

Ikanos Communications, one of the world’s top suppliers of VDSL chips, entered the fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) market this week with the introduction of a new residential gateway.

The Vx170 gateway, available in limited quantities now and generally in June, would be used as part of a broadband home router in FTTH networks, sitting inside the home and interfacing with the optical network terminal (ONT) on the outside of the house. Taking in Ethernet traffic from the ONT, the Vx170 can route and provision that traffic at “up to 1 Gb/s,” Ikanos said. The 2.7 GHz gateway includes voice and security engines as well as Ethernet “accelerator processors” to take on various other functions. It can support a variety of in-home networking technologies including multimedia over coaxial cable (MoCA), HomePNA, Powerline Communication and 802.11n wireless distribution.

“This is a big step for Ikanos,” said Dean Westman, general manager of Ikanos’ gateway products group. “We’re moving out of the DSL-dominated 100 Mb/s world and moving into the gigabit routing capability.”

The 170 is based on the Fusiv architecture Ikanos introduced last fall as part of an expansion of its technology to address network topology layers two through seven. That architecture separates the data and the control planes, using the central processing unit for the control plane and dividing data plane functions among hardware and other programmable processors to distribute the workload, thereby maintaining desired speeds.