The road to GPON is about to be paved.
BellSouth, SBC Communications and Verizon have notified vendors to expect an RFP for Gigabit Passive Optical Networking technology in November, helping to immediately put that technology on the launch pad for 2006.
Although the companies have not formally announced their plans, and could not confirm the RFP Tuesday, industry sources say they are once again acting as a Joint Procurement Consortium, as they have to solicit bids for DSL gear and for broadband PON or BPON, which is the technology Verizon is deploying today.
The announcement is not a huge surprise – Verizon CTO Mark A. Wegleitner has stated publicly that his company will deploy GPON in 2006 – and the three companies have successfully worked as a JPC in the past on major technology initiatives. One outcome of that work is to jumpstart technology by giving vendors a clear goal. This decision means, however, that the three Bell companies are skipping over Ethernet PON or EPON to go to the much faster GPON.
“If there was any doubt in the industry that EPON had a potential play in the RBOCs’ network, this lays that to rest,” said Daniel Briere, CEO of the TeleChoice consultancy. “We had been saying all along that 2006 was the year that GPON is going to hit. This is being driven by the fact that IPTV is going to happen, it is going to happen really soon, and they are going to need the bandwidth to do it.”
Microsoft’s IPTV software, in particular, requires additional bandwidth to support channel changes, Briere said. GPON as a standard was initiated by FSAN – the same group of carriers and vendors who launched ATM-based BPON – in 2001, as a means of standardizing service delivery at 1 gigabit per second and up. The GPON standard enables the transmission of TDM and data traffic in their native formats for additional efficiencies.
http://telephonyonline.com/fttp/news/GPON_RFP_Bells_100405/
BellSouth, SBC Communications and Verizon have notified vendors to expect an RFP for Gigabit Passive Optical Networking technology in November, helping to immediately put that technology on the launch pad for 2006.
Although the companies have not formally announced their plans, and could not confirm the RFP Tuesday, industry sources say they are once again acting as a Joint Procurement Consortium, as they have to solicit bids for DSL gear and for broadband PON or BPON, which is the technology Verizon is deploying today.
The announcement is not a huge surprise – Verizon CTO Mark A. Wegleitner has stated publicly that his company will deploy GPON in 2006 – and the three companies have successfully worked as a JPC in the past on major technology initiatives. One outcome of that work is to jumpstart technology by giving vendors a clear goal. This decision means, however, that the three Bell companies are skipping over Ethernet PON or EPON to go to the much faster GPON.
“If there was any doubt in the industry that EPON had a potential play in the RBOCs’ network, this lays that to rest,” said Daniel Briere, CEO of the TeleChoice consultancy. “We had been saying all along that 2006 was the year that GPON is going to hit. This is being driven by the fact that IPTV is going to happen, it is going to happen really soon, and they are going to need the bandwidth to do it.”
Microsoft’s IPTV software, in particular, requires additional bandwidth to support channel changes, Briere said. GPON as a standard was initiated by FSAN – the same group of carriers and vendors who launched ATM-based BPON – in 2001, as a means of standardizing service delivery at 1 gigabit per second and up. The GPON standard enables the transmission of TDM and data traffic in their native formats for additional efficiencies.
http://telephonyonline.com/fttp/news/GPON_RFP_Bells_100405/
