New GPON gear hits the floor at NXTcomm

With the market for Gigabit passive optical networking accelerating this year, equipment suppliers are swarming around the space more than ever. At least three vendors are unveiling new GPON gear at the NXTcomm trade show this week.

Though Verizon began deploying GPON in field trials late last year, the GPON equipment market slowed as Verizon's chief PON supplier, Tellabs, lowered the price of its older, lower-speed broadband PON (BPON) products to cool the urgency for GPON migration. But the market is heating up this summer as Verizon starts its transition from BPON to GPON. (A commercial deployment in Kirklyn, Pa., this summer is Verizon's second, after one in Lewisville, Texas, this spring.) The BPON market is expected to erode rapidly as a result, shrinking 33% this year and dropping off dramatically in the next two years, according to Infonetics Research.

Wave7 Optics, until now mainly a vendor of Ethernet PON (EPON) systems, is adding a GPON offering to its portfolio this week. The company initially announced in September 2005 that its Trident7 Optical Access Platform “fully supports” GPON. But that was a reference to the product's backplane and input/output cards, said a Wave7 spokesman last week. GPON chip sets weren't yet mature back in 2005, he said. “That came to fruition a few weeks ago.”

Zhone Technologies is unveiling at NXTComm the GPON gear it has been promising publicly since January. A new line card for the vendor's MALC broadband loop carrier system delivers standards-based GPON to as many as 64 subscribers. Zhone hopes to differentiate its system with added Layer 3 intelligence in the customer-located optical network terminal (ONT). That product, the zNID, has remote monitoring and management capabilities based on TR-069, the DSL Forum standard widely used for DSL modems. That intelligence allows carriers to monitor everything from recent calls and channel changes to the zNID's environmental conditions. And the device is powered over the existing phone lines in the home.

Calix is also making GPON news at the show. Its 2005 acquisition of Optical Solutions made it one of the leaders of the GPON sector, but at 1.2 Gb/s downstream and 622 Mb/s upstream, its brand of GPON was slower than the current generation offered by Alcatel-Lucent, Hitachi Telecom and others, which deliver nearly 2.5 Gb/s down and 1.2 Gb/s up. Moreover, Calix's C7 multiservice access platform (which includes support for legacy services) offered only BPON at 622 Mb/s downstream. Next month, Calix will start shipping a new module for the C7 that delivers those higher speeds to up to 256 subscribers (or 5120 subscribers per C7). All of the 700 series ONTs that Calix's customers have already deployed to users' homes will automatically detect and assimilate to the higher speeds when the new module is deployed, Calix said, requiring no truck rolls to homes for the upgrade.

That news should come as a relief to carriers like Georgia's Planters Rural Telephone Cooperative, which reluctantly deployed BPON over the C7 last year as other vendors offered GPON speed. Meanwhile, Calix's F series products, the ones it obtained from Optical Solutions, still delivers just 1.2 Gb/s downstream, though the 2.4 Gb/s upgrade is on the road map,, said Geoff Burke, director of field marketing for Calix.

One access vendor not announcing new GPON gear at NXTComm is Adtran, which is instead making several other new product announcements. Although Adtran isn't announcing a new GPON product at the show, it might have one in its booth, the company said, with a formal announcement sometime soon.