Who Makes What: GPON & WDM-PON Equipment

This Who Makes What installment is an update to Light Reading’s August 2008 Who Makes What: GPON Equipment, so it uses the same product categories. Twelve months is becoming a long time in the GPON world, and an update is needed to reflect the continual changes in a growing, but still somewhat erratic, market. Readers should consult the original article for background on aspects of PON technology.

As Light Reading Insider pointed out in November 2008, GPON’s worldwide rollout in '08 had not really met earlier expectations. In North America, Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) and various smaller rural operators did their bit, but European operators in general failed to commit in a large way to GPON, although there were some encouraging signs of interest in GPON in some Asian markets (see Figure 1). A recent example of such Asian interest is the Indian operator Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (BSNL) ’s plan to roll out GPON in 25 cities by 2012, for which in July 2009 it awarded a $77 million contract to the Indian optical-cable and telecom integration and management provider, Sterlite Technologies Ltd.

Yet the Insider sticks to its guns and believes that GPON remains the most likely FTTH technology to succeed in the short and medium term, and so would be the technology of choice for FTTH rollouts in most regions of the world over the next two to five years. This would make the global GPON equipment market a sizable $2 billion-plus by 2011.

And communications market researcher Infonetics Research Inc. noted, in its June 2009 first-quarter editions of its Broadband Aggregation Hardware and Subscribers and PON and FTTH Equipment and Subscribers reports, that the PON market is subject to periodic dips, especially following periods of sustained OLT deployments, such a dip having occurred in the first quarter of the year. Nevertheless, despite this overall dip, GPON manufacturers’ revenues increased by 12 percent in the quarter, and GPON is one of the fastest-growing PON segments, which include also BPON, EPON, and WDM-PON. The company forecasts total worldwide PON revenues to reach $4.6 billion by 2013.

Recent GPON network implementations announced since Figure 1 was prepared show that the widespread appeal of the technology continues. They include:

And, while in bullet-point mode, the GPON industry itself has not stood still as it reacts to market and business realities. Among recent mergers, acquisitions, and reorganizations of vendors with GPON interests are:

So the overall listing of Table 1 reflects some of these changes.

Table 1: Vendors Included in This Who Makes What: GPON & WDM-PON Equipment

We have tried to make the listing as complete as possible in the time available for its compilation, but this is where you, Dear Reader, can help with any companies that may have been missed.

If any companies need to be added, or any information corrected, please bring it to our attention either on the message board below or by sending an email to [email protected] or to [email protected], placing "Who Makes What: GPON & WDM-PON Equipment" in the subject line.

Here’s a hyperlinked contents list:

— Tim Hills is a freelance telecommunications writer and journalist. He's a regular author of Light Reading reports.

Next Page: ONTs & OLTs

ONTs and OLTs are not species of gnome, but are Optical Network Terminals and Optical Line Terminal (OLT)s. ONTs are sometimes referred to as Optical Network Unit (ONU)s.

As Who Makes What: GPON Equipment points out, the OLT is the central-office-based hardware that sits between the carrier's metro optical network and the homes hooked up to fiber connections, while the ONT sits at the customer's home, and can support a variety of features, including streaming video, RF video, and TDM services. Frequently, the OLT is but part of, or an aspect of, some form of multiservice or universal access platform or family of platforms.

Tables 2 and 3 list vendors of GPON ONTs and OLTs, respectively. Note that, as vendors often sell ONTs and OLTs as a single system, some of the companies listed have the same product name for both types of equipment.

Table 2: Vendors of GPON ONTs

Table 3: Vendors of GPON OLTs

What’s new?
ONTs and OLTs are the visible end products of the GPON industry, and vendors continue to release upgrades or new products with which to address telco concerns and to tempt them to commit to rolling out the technology.

On the ONT side, vendors with new offerings not listed in the August 2008 Who Makes What report include Enablence Technologies, Motorola, and Occam Networks. These also give a useful overview of the type of capabilities now available:

Enablence Technologies launched in September 2008 the ONT-G888 series of ITU-compliant (G.984) GPON ONTs to complement its TRIDENT7 Universal Access Platform. This ONT is aimed at applications for multidwelling units (MDUs), and provides an environmentally hardened ONT for internal or external mounting, with eight Ethernet ports, eight POTS ports, and eight RF video ports. An integrated RF return is optionally available, supporting an RF return over the same single fiber as for the other services, and without additional wavelengths.Motorola released at Supercomm 2008 the ONT1400GT ITU-compliant GPON optical network terminal (ONT), which the company characterizes as “optimized for the delivery of IP and RF video entertainment and broadband services.” In feature terms, Motorola sees this involving such things as:

Occam Networks launched three GPON ONTs in April 2009, each targeting a different type of application:

These vendor examples illustrate some of the main themes of current ONT product-portfolio development, which include:

On the OLT side, since it has to mirror with the ONT side, there are some obviously similar trends and issues, but also others that are specific to large lumps of expensive NEBS-rated kit sitting at the central office or head-end. So some key words here are green (as in power efficiency), capacity (as in supporting lots of subscribers and video-traffic throughput), simplification (as in O&M), and multitechnology (as in supporting different PON technologies, such as GPON, EPON, and GEPON, from one OLT platform).

ZTE modestly claimed three of these as its 2008 Christmas present to the telecom world, saying that its new ZXA10 C300 multiservice access platform was not only green, converged, future-proof, and high capacity, but also the world’s first unified platform that supported GPON, EPON, and P2P, as well as the emerging IEEE 10G-EPON and FSAN/ITU-T NG-PON in a single shelf.

(As Enablence Technologies had claimed only a few months earlier that its TRIDENT7 was “the only FTTH platform on the market capable of supporting ITU G.984 GPON, IEEE 802.3 GE-PON (EFM PON), and IEEE 802.3 Point-to-Point optical access standards from a common platform,” Light Reading invites both companies – and others – to slug it out on the Message Board for this report. Is "shelf" the key word here?)

Working backwards through the alphabet, more recently (June 2009) Zhone has plumped for high capacity with its new MXK intelligent terabit access concentrator line, which it modestly (and obscurely) describes as “a category-defining addition to the company's family of carrier-class multi-service access platform (MSAP) products.” This offers a non-blocking capacity of up to 3,600 100-Mbit/s GPON subscribers or 360 1-Gbit/s Active Ethernet subscribers per chassis, thereby apparently blowing the socks off the competition.

Other nice features for GPON cognoscenti, according to Zhone include:

Occam Networks, too, offered high capacity with its new BLC 6012i High Capacity Chassis, launched in November 2008, but emphasized improved and simplified installation, thereby reducing turn-up time. With a capacity of 12 BLC 6000 blades, the device can use any current model blade in any slot and in any configuration, while supporting up to 1,536 subscribers, depending on the mix of blades used. It also uses a distributed intelligence architecture for interblade connectivity, which Occam says gives great flexibility and eliminates the cost of common equipment – and by integrating the Ethernet connections into the backplane, the 6012i chassis simplifies operation.

Finally, in tweak-and-improvement mode, Alcatel-Lucent in September 2008 added three new features to its 7342 ISAM Fiber-to-the-User (FTTU) system, covering optical monitoring, metro Ethernet connectivity, and remote synchronization. In essence, all three point toward the increasing maturity of the technology and the further extension of its use into mainstream telecom applications, where the same network can be used to provide both residential and business services. Thus, while optical monitoring adds nitty-gritty things such as Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI) optical test and measurement, metro Ethernet connectivity supports such things as the standardized MEF virtual private networking (VPN) services and other Ethernet services.

Remote synchronization may seem obscure, but the company says that support for IEEE 1588 timing provides the necessary synchronization for the remote placement of GPON systems in outside plant and the provision of connectivity for DS1 services, frequently used in business connectivity and mobile backhaul.

A further sign of GPON’s increasing maturity was provided by the Seventh GPON Interoperability Event held in April 2008 and organized by Telcordia Technologies Inc. in cooperation with Full Service Access Network (FSAN) , an industry and operator interest group promoting broadband fiber access networks, along with Corning Cable Systems LLC (CCS) and TraceSpan Communications Inc. As with all upcoming telecom technologies, interoperability is crucial to the establishment of operator acceptance and cost reductions through volume production.

The main goal was to demonstrate GPON equipment management interoperability via the ONT Management and Control Interface (OMCI), with focus on best practices documented in the draft International Telecommunication Union, Standardization Sector (ITU-T) G-PON G.984.4 Implementers' Guide (G.984.4impl). Thirteen GPON equipment and integrated-circuit device vendors participated, and test cases were performed to verify the ONT equipment management, including OMCC establishment, Management Information Base (MIB) synchronization operations, ONT capability discover, and ONT software image updating.

Commenting in a statement after the event, Regis Coat of Orange (NYSE: FTE), co-chair of the FSAN Interoperability Task Group, expressed satisfaction with the results, which he said showed that “plug-and-play GPON interoperability will soon become a reality and demonstrates the maturity of GPON technology.”

Next Page: Triplexers & GPON Chips

Compared to the continuing developments in ONTs and OLTs, triplexers – one of the key optical components in these pieces of kit mentioned in Who Makes What: GPON Equipment – seem to have been having a more sedate time recently. Table 4 adds a couple more vendors to the listing of the 2008 Who Makes What, but there appears to be little to add in terms of new product offerings. This page therefore turns its attention to GPON chips, an area that has seen some activity since mid-2008. Table 5 lists vendors and sample chip products.Table 4: Vendors of GPON Triplexers

Table 5: Vendors of GPON Chips

What’s new?
The essential message on the GPON chip side is that the silicon vendors are working hard to enable the low-cost, high-volume production of sophisticated ONTs and OLTs that will be needed to roll out GPON further as a mass-market technology. GPON system-on-chips (SoCs) therefore figure prominently. Snapshots of recent offerings along these lines include the following:

Broadcom said in June 2009 that it would introduce a new family of GPON integrated access device (IAD) semiconductors in China during the year. This BCM6800 family of GPON gateway processors are designed to enable more cost-effective ONTs/ONUs, Broadcom said.

Cortina Systems announced, also in June 2009, its Integrated Access platform, which includes silicon and software solutions that it says are optimized for 1- and 10-Gigabit EPON, GPON, and Active Ethernet access technologies. Part of the Integrated Access Platform is the CS8x12 product family, described by Cortina as the industry’s first MDU products addressing EPON, GPON, and Active Ethernet deployments. The CS8x12 is a carrier-class, single-chip MDU device with integrated aggregation switch, carrier-class traffic manager, and Ethernet or xDSL subscriber interface. The CS8x12 product family comprises the CS8212 (GPON) and CS8012 (EPON) SoC devices. Both devices, as part of the Integrated Access platform, share the same software model, can reuse board design rules, and can be configured in Active Ethernet configuration to address non-PON-based fiber deployment.

Cortina says that all this means that the CS8x12 provides a low-power, cost-optimized, and standards-compliant PON MDU solution that would otherwise require up to three chips.

PMC-Sierra, evidently espousing the marketing philosophy of not single spies, but in battalions, announced in September 2008 three new GPON SoC products: the PAS7401 GPON ONT, the MSP7162 GPON Gateway, and the PAS5211 four-port GPON OLT. Device features (which give a useful indication of the range of SoC capabilities now on offer), according to the company, include:

Xelerated announced in July 2008 a new reference design for GPON using the company’s new HX300 family of network processor units (NPUs) and Ethernet switches interoperating with Broadlight’s BL3458 controller. The design is suited for both chassis-based GPON systems and ETSI-based pizza boxes, the company says.

Next Page: PON's Progress

Full Service Access Network (FSAN) has established the Next Generation PON (NG-PON) task group to look at the evolution of optical access systems beyond GPON, and is considering various technology and architecture options, as well as how an operator could migrate from an existing ITU-T GPON (or IEEE GEPON) to such an NG-PON. A basic aim is to boost both bit rates and the number of customers that PONs can handle.

The task group is broadly following a two-pronged approach. One is to agree on an NG-PON technology that can coexist with the existing GPON technology and standards, and which may therefore be regarded as an intermediate technology. This involves such approaches as WDM, stacked GPON, and long-distance GPON, and with the idea that the ITU-T can move to a standard around 2011. The second is to develop a technology that is independent of GPON and which could eventually replace it. This is where WDM-PON, for example, comes in, but other aspects include ultra-long-reach systems (around 100km) capable of supporting about 1000 customers per PON (GPON currently has a split ration of 1:128) – these would have obvious application in serving remote rural areas, for example.

However, PON development continues apace across a range of technologies, and although focus of this Who Makes What is GPON and WDM-PON, it’s appropriate to take make at least a very brief acknowledgement of a couple of the others first. It’s also worth noting that a certain amount of corporate gung-ho-ism is going on, as companies vie to produce the fastest, etc., potential next-generation PON technology. A recent example is Oki Electric Industries’ March 2009 claim to have developed the world's first 160-Gbit/s (downstream total) ultra-high-speed optical next-generation asymmetric PON system that uses hybrid Optical Time Division Multiplexing and Optical Code Division Multiplexing – essentially a joint TDM/WDM system.

EPON
EPON, which is very much the dominant form of PON technology in Asia, is also developing. Standards for the new 10G EPON (as IEEE 802.3av, supporting symmetrical upstream/downstream 10-Gbit/s, and compatible with 802.3ah EPON) are due later in 2009. Meanwhile, early products are appearing.

Vitesse Semiconductor announced in March 2009 the VSC8479-01, which the company billed as the industry's only 10G transceiver integrated circuit to support both burst- and continuous-mode operation required for 10G EPON. Four other devices were announced a week earlier to create a 10G EPON chipset:

ZTE claimed a world first by launching a prototype of a symmetrical 10G EPON system (both OLT and ONT) at the China FTTH Summit 2009 in May. The company said that it had developed a symmetrical 10G EPON board that could be added to its existing unified optical access platform currently supporting EPON and GPON. The resulting 10G EPON port can support 1G EPON ONU, asymmetrical 10G EPON ONU, and symmetrical 10G EPON ONU on the same optical distribution network (ODN) – the idea being to provide operators with an option to evolve from EPON to 10G EPON. ZTE has also launched a symmetrical 10G EPON ONU product.

RFoG
Radio Frequency Over Glass (RFoG) is essentially a cable-type PON technology, as it enables existing RF video service to be translated straight to PONs. See The Future of Fiber Access for more on this technology.

Recently, GPON vendors are becoming interested in this market – for example:

Alloptic itself continues to develop RFoG, a recent example being its Docsis PON Controller (DPC) software, released in March 2009, which enables Docsis provisioning and control of its EPON system. DPC facilitates the acceleration of PON rollouts by MSOs and others using Docsis for service delivery, Alloptic said.

10G GPON
This is one of the possible intermediate developments of GPON technology being considered by FSAN. It increases the downstream rate to 10 Gbit/s (and the upstream to 2.5 Gbit/s), and currently is espoused by a small number of vendors, although still as various prototypes. For example, Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson are long-standing supporters and were joined in September 2008 by Huawei Technologies, when it announced its 10G GPON prototype.

Essentially, 10G GPON could be approached in various ways, such as increasing the GPON line rate or using (coarse) WDM to build several parallel slower-rate (say, 4x2.5-Gbit/s) PONs over an existing GPON deployment to allow wavelength channel bonding, thereby increasing the total bandwidth available. Either way, the greater bandwidth remains shared among users in the same way as for the original GPON.

WDM-PON
The ne plus ultra of PON development is probably WDM-PON in the sense of using a dense wavelength grid to overlay a large number of parallel high-bandwidth channels onto a single PON structure. By using appropriate wavelength filters (and splitters where necessary) a very flexible structure could be created: For example, individual customers could have their own wavelengths, or a single wavelength could be dedicated to an apartment block and shared there.

Thus first products (and implementations) are beginning to appear, but essentially this technology is still at the bits-and-pieces and development stages – architectures and parts of systems are being defined or are appearing, but much gap filling and pulling together still need to be done.

On the product side, for example, ADC Telecommunications proposed its PONy Express Transport Platform architecture a couple of years ago to overcome some DWDM laser problems in PON applications, and finally demonstrated it in September 2008. The company says that the platform combines with a WDM-PON plug-and-play splitter in a fiber distribution cabinet to provide an upgrade from GPON to WDM-PON.

ADVA Optical Networking in the same month introduced its Flexible Remote Node (FRN), an extension of the ADVA FSP 3000 platform that provides WDM-PON capabilities. The company says that, when located at the curb, the FRN can be configured as a purely passive network element with environmentally hardened WDM filters that support a point-to-multipoint WDM-PON structure. Alternatively, located at a street cabinet, the FRN can include active equipment such as optical amplifiers and active Ethernet technology for reach extension and traffic aggregation.

Nortel/LG Nortel said that its Ethernet Access solution launched in September 2009 was one of the industry's first to use WDM-PON architecture, and that the Netherlands-based service provider UNET BV was using this system on fiber to homes and businesses across that country.

On the components/device side, Applied Optoelectronics announced in the same month a small form-factor pluggable transceiver designed for operation in the colorless ONTs used in WDM-PONs. Major research projects into future WDM-PON technologies are in progress in various parts of the world. Europe’s Scalable Advance Ring-based passive Dense Access Network Architecture (SARDANA), for example, aims to increase both the capacity and reach of broadband access networks through combining both WDM-PON and remote amplification. According to Tellabs, one of the participants, this combination can increase the range of PON service to 100km, with each OLT serving 10 times the number of users as a conventional GPON system.

GigaWaM is another European WDM-PON initiative (after all, Europeans did much of the very early PON work in the 1970s), but this time aimed at developing application-specific optical components, with an ultimate target of achieving a system cost-per-subscriber below that of current GPONs. One of the participants, Ignis, announced in March 2009 that the project had demonstrated the production of AWGs with a 1.5 percent index. The company said in a statement that this was an important aspect of the GigaWaM cost-reduction objective, as the AWG dimensions have a significant impact on cost-per-channel for the central office: Going to a 1.5 percent index from a 0.75 percent index effectively reduces the AWG area to 25 percent relative to that of the 0.75 percent index, and represents a major cost reduction.

Table 6 lists some vendors and their activities in the area of WDM-PON development.

Table 6: Vendors & WDM-PON Activities or Products

— Tim Hills is a freelance telecommunications writer and journalist. He's a regular author of Light Reading reports.

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