PON News

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SARDANA awarded Global Telecoms Business "Innovation Award 2011"

June 8, 2011

SARDANA, a consortium of European communications companies and research universities, was recently awarded the Innovation Award 2011 by Global Telecoms Business (GTB). SARDANA is an acronym for Scaled Advanced Ring- based passive Dense Access Network Architecture and is a project focused on next-generation PON technologies. Specifically, the award recognized SARDANA's efforts in deploying a ring topology utilizing WDM-PON solutions to increase capacity, density, and extend the optical reach of traditional telco access and metro transport technologies. The project demonstrated that PON solutions can be extended well beyond their typical footprint and in this case, France Telecom was able to deploy field trials realizing passive fiber connectivity up to 100 km (60 miles) compared to the typical GPON standard of 20 km (12 miles). The architecture consists of Tellabs GPON hardware integrated with a WDM ring topology utilizing 32 wavelengths. Each strand of fiber provided 10 Gbps upstream and 2.5 Gbps downstream per PON port. Tellabs, a U.S. company, is the only manufacturer in the SARDANA consortium. "Convergence is what SARDANA is all about. By merging the metro and access parts of the networks, carriers can reduce capital costs," says Dan Kelly, executive vice president, Tellabs global products. "The challenge for service providers is how to deliver more and more services at higher bandwidths and make the economics work when revenue per user is largely fixed. We understand that very well, and it challenges us to innovate and drive down costs."

General Dynamics wins Huge POL Implementation

June 7, 2011

The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) announced yesterday that General Dynamics has been awarded a nearly $1 Billion dollar contract to design, deliver, and install information technology, security, and audio-visual infrastructure for the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) new Washington D.C. headquarters. The systems will be installed into new as well as refurbished historical facilities at the St. Elizabeths Hospital campus in Southeast Washington. The entire campus will operate over what will be the largest passive optical LAN to be installed to date. Insiders on the contract say that General Dynamics has selected Science Applications International (SAIC) as the systems integrator for the POL design and installation efforts and that the hardware manufacturer has yet to be selected. GSA Administrator Martha N. Johnson provided a statement on the infrastructure saying, "All of GSA is partnering with DHS to create a model campus that is green, energy efficient, and secure, with an integrated technology backbone that can accommodate IT, physical security and smart building networks for the agency well into the future."

PON Sales UP, DSL Down

While the overall market for subscriber-based equipment manufacturers was down 2 percent in the first quarter of 2011, according to a recently released Infonetics Reseach report (infonetics.com). During the same 1st quarter, the PON market itself increased 20 percent compared to a double-digit decrease for the DSL equipment market. PON spending now represents a 1 Billion dollar industry. This points to a dramatic, yet predictable shift towards fiber based subscriber architectures such as GPON and EPON. While DSL is by far a more widely deployed architecture than PON, new equipment sales have clearly moved towards PON systems. This is particularly true in China and other Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea which have been rolling out PON for several years. In these markets, EPON is the dominant PON architecture and EPON is estimated to serve 40 million subscribers worldwide according to the Infonetics report. The report shows a 46 percent increase in EPON spending versus the fourth quarter of 2010. In the North American market, GPON continues to expand its foothold as Broadband Stimulus funding drives new projects forward. Manufacturers such as Calix and Zhone Technologies have benefitted from these opportunities in the last year or so. Verizon is also poised to ramp up their FiOS build outs again after a slow down due to the current economic slump.

Enablence announces 8 port GPON card

Enablence Technologies, Inc.(TSX VENTURE:ENA), a manufacturer of FTTH equipment and optical components for access, metro and long-haul markets, announced on May 12th, 2011 the availability of an 8 port GPON card for its BroadAccess Multi-Service Access Platform (MSAP). The new LI-OLT8 module provides a port density rarely seen in GPON hardware by connecting 256 (1x32 split) or 512 (1x64 split) ONTs per module. This brings the maximum capacity of a single BroadAccess MSAP chassis to 4,608 subscribers. The Enablence MSAP chassis also supports ADSL2+, VDSL2, Gigabit Ethernet, and other copper services from the same chassis that supports the new GPON card.

Features included in the LI-OLT8 GPON module include:

•8 GPON OLT ports (up to 64 ONT's/ONT's or 512 ONT's/ONT's per LI-OLT8 card)
•ITU-T G.984 Standards compliance
•Per-port 4K Port-ID
•Flexible port ID mapping
•Dynamic and static T-CONT
•Upstream and downstream prioritization
•Hardened for remote terminal applications