Whatever happened to the combination ONT-home router?

(Part 1 of 2)

For years, many in the telecom industry imagined that the two boxes most commonly deployed at the customer location in fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) networks – the optical network terminal (ONT) and the broadband home router (BHR) – would eventually merge into one device that combined both functions. But while that product has been built by multiple vendors, it is not widely sold in the US today, for a few reasons.

Both Alcatel-Lucent and Motorola, Verizon’s gigabit passive optical network (GPON) equipment suppliers, claim to have developed a combination ONT/BHR, but neither vendor has made the product generally available so far. (Alcatel-Lucent shipped it to a European customer for whom it was custom-made, and Motorola has not shipped its product.)

Part of the reason for that is that widespread commercial demand has not materialized yet, as most carriers deploying GPON are new enough to the practice that they don’t want to add to that complexity by unwrapping experimental new product combinations in their customers’ homes. But one US carrier in particular does make a habit of such bleeding-edge exploration. In an interview with Telephony two years ago, Mark Wegleitner, chief technology officer of Verizon Communications, the de facto driver of North American FTTP technology development, described the benefits of an ONT/BHR while minimizing some its inherent challenges. And according to one of its suppliers, the carrier formally requested information from vendors last year on the specifics of such a product. But last week a spokesperson told Telephony in an email, “Verizon is still investigating an ONT/BHR combination unit as part of an ongoing review of the ONT evolutionary options, [but the] focus right now is on shrinking the ONT and the battery backup unit.”

In theory, combining the boxes would yield cost savings, as they would share common chips, power supply and housing and take up less space. But it would require carriers to bring fiber throughout the home rather than to the outside wall. It would also potentially constrain maintenance capabilities (outside ONTs can be repaired any time but indoor visits would have to be scheduled with customers). And it could give rise to other issues. 

ROUTERS VERSUS ONTS

“The caution is: Are you linking technologies that are running at different development speeds,” said Kevin Keith, vice president of product marketing for Motorola. “If router technology is changing every 12 months but the ONT is based on a standard, it’s going to develop over three or five years, it could create issues. [Carriers] might end up leaving something in the home longer than they would have necessarily and miss a technology cycle. But I think now it’s kind of leveled off, so if I build a router that has a 10/100/1-gig port and it has all the latest wireless technology in it, it’ll be there for a while.”