3:20 PM -- Motorola Inc. (NYSE: MOT) came out today with a PON for enterprises -- the passive optical LAN (POL), as they call it. (See Moto Says Hello to Passive Optical LANs.)

I've always wondered if someone would pursue this idea. In years past, we were told that financial companies -- being rich, impatient, and not yet bankrupt -- were building their own carrier-grade fiber networks, and that hospitals had need for such networks, too.

The POL sounds like Motorola's GPON on a smaller scale. A spokeswoman tells me it's intended to be sold to carriers, which could then offer PON services -- presumably over the carriers' own leased fiber; I can't imagine digging up the ground just for one enterprise's LAN. Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) will be reselling the POL to enterprises.

The handicap is obvious: You can't do this without fiber. And as the Ethernet services camp will tell you repeatedly, fiber doesn't reach most buildings yet. I'd assume POL has a fiber-to-the-node model available, using DSL as PONs do in regular life.

UPDATE: Frank's comments, below, are correct: I did misunderstand the nature of POL. It's an in-building product. The PON's customer premises box, the optical network terminal (ONT), is renamed a "workgroup terminal" here, and has four Gigabit Ethernet ports and power over Ethernet (PoE) capabilities, among other features. The optical line terminal (OLT) is called an "enterprise aggregation switch," as it contains switching functions you wouldn't need in the residental PON case. It's all about eliminating wiring-closet switches, not about broadband access.

— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor, Light Reading

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