Motorola selling GPON corporate LANs

Motorola (NYSE: MOT) today unveiled a gigabit passive optical networking (GPON) platform designed for corporate local area networks (LANs) that the vendor says it has been selling for more than a year with help from Verizon Business' federal government unit.

Motorola's Passive Optical LAN is similar to the GPON gear deployed by Verizon Communications and others in residential fiber-to-the-premises networks but re-tooled for enterprise networks.

Unlike a typical enterprise LAN, which stems from a central core switch/router to "work-group" switches on each floor, Motorola's GPON LAN system stems from a central access switch to passive optical splitters on each floor that, unlike work-group switches, don't require power or cooling. Those splitters distribute the network to as many as 32 "work-group terminals (WGTs)," which are functionally analogous to the home-side optical network terminals in residential networks. Each WGT has four 10/100/1000-megabit-per-second Ethernet ports to serve a mix of devices such as phones, computers and wireless LANs, which can distribute connectivity even further. And the end devices in each work group would share bandwidth (2.4 gigabits per second downstream, 1.2 Gb/s upstream) with the others in their splitter group. Motorola said each one of its access switches can serve up to 7,000 stationary Ethernet devices.

Using GPON for business LANs not only eliminates the need for work-group switches on each floor, Motorola said, it eliminates the typical 100-meter distance limits inherent in most Ethernet LAN networks. GPON gear has a range of about 20 kilometers between the switch and the terminating gear, Motorola said.

Motorola has been selling its GPON LAN gear for more than a year through Verizon Federal Network Systems, a unit of Verizon Business that serves the federal government. Today the vendor announced that the gear will also be resold by Science Applications International Corporation, or SAIC, a major federal government contractor.

Because the system requires fiber to be deployed throughout the buildings it serves rather than the Cat 4 and Cat 5 copper cabling typically used in corporate LANs, it is targeted most often toward businesses that are moving or expanding or otherwise facing choices about deploying new infrastructure.

And because the system would require Ethernet LAN managers to understand GPON technology, some training is required. "But it's a simple technology to operate -- much simpler than existing technologies from a management perspective," said Steve Hersey, senior director of marketing for Motorola's access network solutions. "And supporting our customers with that training is part of our go-to-market strategy."

Alcatel-Lucent, a competitor of Motorola's in the GPON space (both supply Verizon's GPON network), said in an email today that it has been selling GPON corporate LANs -- which it calls "fiber-to-the-desktop" -- for about two years. In addition to enterprises, it cited the military as a source of demand for the products.

“We have seen more interest in GPON for the enterprise segment in the last six to 12 months, so it seems to be getting some more attention now,” said Rich Loveland, senior marketing manager for Alcatel-Lucent.