Winning the PON wars

Ovum-RHK believes 2007 will become the break-out year for ITU-GPON. The market research company has always argued that the PON market will develop along the following lines:

• IEEE EPON (or GE-PON) deployments largely relegated to the Far East
• ITU-GPON deployments confined to EMEA and North America
  

However, Ovum-RHK now believes GPON is gaining ground in the Far East, following recent discussions with operators there. The operators claim GPON pricing is becoming more competitive, and they are keen to use its greater bandwidth. It also offers better support for legacy multi-services and video.

Accordingly, EPON could become confined to Japan only while GPON becomes adopted elsewhere in Asia. That would make the Far East the largest market for GPON.

Meanwhile, in Europe DT is working on deploying GPON to the curb and offering VDSL2 to end users, BT is looking at an amplified version of GPON, and FT has announced it is deploying PON. Meanwhile, North American operators, large and small, are looking at GPON.

The upshot: Ovum-RHK believes GPON will ultimately win.

But an informed source in the EPON camp believes the technology is far from being brushed aside. "China Telecom (CTC) stated in September that GPON is at least two years behind EPON and has almost no chance of interoperability," says the source. "CTC's EPON interoperability testing is already underway."

EPON chip technology now matches GPON's 2.5 Gbps, and because it is Ethernet based, EPON has a 10 Gbps roadmap. "It [the roadmap] is definitely on the horizon" at the IEEE and with certain EPON chip companies. KDDI for one has announced it will use 2.5 Gbps EPON. In turn, cable operators are also embracing EPON, with deployments existing in Japan and the US.

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