Verizon Brings GPON Home

Trying to ready FiOS homes for GPON, Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) announced today it will provide new home gateways made by Actiontec Electronics Inc. and Westell Technologies Inc. (Nasdaq: WSTL) (See Verizon Beefs up Home Gateways.)

Taking advantage of the 1.1 version of the Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) standard, the new gateways reach speeds of 175 Mbit/s over coaxial cable, versus 75 Mbit/s for the gateways Verizon previously used. They can also take advantage of MoCA 1.1's quality of service (QOS) features.

FiOS speeds hit only 50 Mbit/s now, but Verizon wants to kick that up to 100 Mbit/s. "This is all about future-proofing the home and making it GPON ready," says Tushar Saxena, director of home networking technologies for Verizon. (See Verizon Leads the Great 100-Mbit/s Bandwidth Race and Verizon Spells Out 100 Mbit/s.)

Verizon started ramping up its GPON deployments in the FiOS network at the beginning of this year. (See Verizon Preps GPON Push and Verizon's Going Strong on GPON.)

The gateways also come with dual-core processors, letting them support more devices than their predecessors. This could come in handy for applications like home security (See Verizon Previews FiOS Future.).

Yes, you could just use a PC, but PCs aren't always turned on, Saxena says. "We're moving more from a PC-centric home service environment to more of an appliance-centric environment."

Another possible application Saxena points out: memory cards that create a wireless connection for your digital camera.

"These cards convert any digital camera into a wireless camera. Then when you take a photograph, it'll instantaneously appear on any device in the home. We could potentially then offer a service that would reside on the gateway that would automatically back up any pictures you take."

— Raymond McConville, Reporter, Light Reading