Globalcomm: Tellabs unveils GPON, VDSL2 FTTC gear

CHICAGO--Tellabs is unveiling its long-awaited gigabit passive optical networking (GPON) platform at the Globalcomm trade show in Chicago this week, as well as adding a faster form of DSL to its fiber-to-the-curb system.

Like most of its rivals’ GPON platforms, the 8865 optical line terminal (OLT) offers 2.4 Gb/s downstream and 1.2 Gb/s upstream bandwidth, with 1 Gb/s and 10 Gb/s uplinks. It supports up to 124 interfaces, which--split 32 ways--can serve 3968 subscribers. In the future, it might be split 64 ways, based on customer demand, a Tellabs spokesperson said.

“This is very extensible platform,” he said. “While it might be 10 Gb/s per slot today, it’s evolvable to 20 Gb/s and more.”

In particular, Tellabs is touting the intelligence of the system, which is based on the 8860 multiservice router Tellabs inherited through its 2003 acquisition of Vivace Networks. In addition to supporting traditional layer 2 and layer 3 packet-marking methods such as virtual LAN tags, hardware-based ASICs in the 8865 offer their own ability to classify traffic types, allowing carriers to monitor and manage quality of service and assign service hierarchies (for example, favoring voice or video when networks become congested).

The company is also introducing its first GPON customer premises device, the 712 optical network terminal (ONT), which incorporates some of the designs of previous ONTs.

Tellabs won’t say when the GPON gear will be generally available beyond what it has previously said: the second half of this year. Nor will the company comment on whether that schedule has brought it any grief from its key customer, Verizon Communications, whose search for GPON gear includes a requirement for general availability by last April. In March, Lehman Brothers analyst Marcus Kupferschmidt, who thinks Tellabs has a good shot at winning a Verizon GPON contract, argued that missing such a deadline by a month or two should not “make or break” a vendor’s chances of being selected for a deployment as big and important as a Verizon GPON buildout.

Separately, Tellabs is also introducing at the show a new line card for the fiber-to-the-curb gear it inherited by acquiring a Marconi business unit that supplys BellSouth. While Tellabs’ 1150 multiservice access system has heretofore been based on ADSL2+, the company is now adding a line card that supports very high data rate DSL 2 (VDSL2), the same technology that is a large part of AT&T’s Project LightSpeed fiber-to-the-node (FTTN) project.

With the new VDSL2 line cards, the 1150 will be able to deliver between 80 Mb/s and 100 Mb/s to each of the 12 homes it typically serves from a distance not greater than 500 feet away. Deployed from farther away, as in a FTTN architecture, VDSL2 would typically deliver roughly 25 Mb/s to each home.

The new VDSL2 cards will be generally available by the end of the month.