THE FUTURE AS SEEN THROUGH TECHNOLOGY

Dhaka, Bangladesh, has no Comcast nor Time Warner, nor a cable TV giant dominating the country's largest city. Instead, there are more than 700 multiple system operators providing service in a fragmented market where some of the MSOs serve as little as a few hundred customers. Many of the operators can afford to own and manage their own networks. Luckily, that is no longer a barrier to entry, thanks to a partnership between systems integrator Sirius Broadband and Salira Systems, a vendor of Gigabit Ethernet passive optical networking, or GE-PON, equipment.

Sirius has deployed the Salira 3000 GE-PON platform in its Zip-infinite fiber network in Dhaka. Sirius operates the network as a wholesale platform on which those dozens of small cable TV operators can resell bandwidth and applications to business and residential users throughout Dhaka. The announcement, made last month, is further proof of how GE-PON innovations are continuing to spread rapidly through Asia, while in the U.S. the promising technology still awaits its spotlight moment with a major carrier.

The deployment also may offer a new case study of how PON technology can be used in an urban market that not only is densely populated — Dhaka had a population of more than 12 million people as of last year — but also densely packed with service providers.

“It's not like the U.S., where there is Comcast and a few large MSOs,” said Rick Li, chief technology officer of Salira Systems. “The situation is unique in the world, though it is common in the surrounding region.”

Li described the deployment as a metro Ethernet in which “each MSO data center has one or more uplinks to the metro Ethernet, which is co-located with an [optical network unit]. Some of the larger carriers may need a multi-port [optical network unit]. The isolation and segregation of the carrier customers is paramount. Each MSO is isolated to its own [virtual LAN] so that there is no interference.”

That may seem like no small feat for a PON platform that typically has been deployed in the access environment and was a proprietary system until becoming available in an 802.3ah-compliant version last October.

The 5-year-old Santa Clara, Calif., company has seen most of its success in Asia, though the GE-PON deployment with Sirius is its first deal in Bangladesh and its first outside of its core markets of China, India and Japan. Salira's position in the world market was magnified last year when Hitachi Communications Technologies of Japan acquired the company, though Li said Salira was at work on the pivotal Dhaka deployment before that deal closed.

Ziaur Rahman, Sirius founder and chairman, said the integrator looked at several GE-PON platforms before deciding on Salira as its vendor.

The carriers in Dhaka are delivering applications that include high-speed Internet access, voice over IP, IPTV, gaming, video-on-demand and other IP services. Bandwidth flexibility will allow those providers to upgrade customers to better-performing broadband service as the need arises.