GIGA-HYPE

Translated from French, puissance d'influence means “the power of influence.” In fact, the power of the French phrasing is so strong that the spelling of the word “influence” remains unaltered when translated from French to English. Imaginez cela. (Imagine that.)

No disrespect to Optical Solutions, which has led the way in the GPON (gigabit passive optical networking) market to date, but sometimes it takes a vendor with the size and influence of an Alcatel to turn spectators into believers. And it appears Alcatel is doing just that: The French vendor is announcing this week that its first optical line terminals based on GPON will hit the market later this year. (For the full details on that rollout, see Ed Gubbins' news exclusive on page 6.)

Alcatel has the power to influence other vendors into stepping up development plans and to pique the interest of service providers around the world. Because of the timing of this announcement, Alcatel seizes the power to do something else: to direct and even dominate the discussion at next week's big industry event, Supercomm.

Throwing this GPON bone out in front of news- and trend-hungry analysts and journalists the week before the show will create a buzz so big it just may knock IMS (IP multimedia subsystem) down a notch.

Supercomm is good for that. The show tends to inspire a World's Fair-like atmosphere that gets everyone excited about the future. It matters not that many people in the telecom world thought the GPON future would be here two years ago. It's here now. Well, almost, anyway — and that's good enough for trade shows.

According to a report by Infonetics Research, overall PON equipment revenue, which hit $525 million in 2004, will reach $2.2 billion by 2008. That's still only half of what the test equipment market is today, and you see how much hoopla that generates.

However, the buzz around technologies like GPON, IMS and other hot initiatives from the world of tomorrow can also induce symptoms more closely associated with the Italian translation of the word influence: influenza. The speed at which new technology rushes to market is dizzying.

Tomorrow aside, there are urgent issues to solve today. Perhaps Supercomm is not the place for shortsightedness, for hand-wringing over IP-based E-911 or interoperability or seamless protocol conversion or how to provision a simple bundled service or how to give customer service reps the information they need when their low-priority landline customer is also a high-priority wireless user. But it would be nice to see some of the old problems tackled even as we celebrate the dawn of a new era of problems — er, challenges — er, opportunities.