Calix Soups up its GPON Engine

by Sean Buckley

 At this year’s annual Cable Show in Las Vegas, Comcast Cable CEO Brian Roberts gushed with joy that with DOCSIS 3.0, they and other cable MSOs would be able to deliver 160 Mbps to each subscriber by 2009.

But Calix thinks that a service provider should not have to wait. In the meantime, Calix says with the debut of its GPON-based 700G ONT (optical network terminal) it can surpass DOCSIS 3.0’s promise of 160 Mbps today.

When compared in terms of average or sustained bandwidth, Calix argues that its 700G ONT’s Gigabit Ethernet interfaces can enable a service provider to deliver 80 Mbps per subscriber in typical configurations versus 640 Kbps for DOCSIS 3.0-enabled cable operators in a 250-home node configuration.

That’s not to say the product is not relevant to the cable operator, though. The new ONT includes an RF band for the current channel lineups and it is compatible with the cable operator’s current STBs (set top boxes).

Such a scenario is not that off base as cable operators themselves are facing an inevitable bandwidth crunch with the increase in HDTV and interactive services such as DVR. These factors will force them to seek out new alternatives, including node splitting, going beyond 750 MHz and even fiber-to-the-home technologies.

Still, outside some of aggressive regional cable operators and independent operators that own their own cable subsidiary, the deployment of GPON/BPON-based fiber-to-the-x networks have been mainly with the traditional service providers.

Options aplenty
Designed for both residential and business applications, Calix’s 700G ONT has built in the requisite horsepower to handle both current and future needs.

Each ONT comes equipped with an Ethernet (10/100 or 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet) port and two voice ports as the base configuration. Although it may seem like overkill today, the 700G can enable a service provider to deliver 1 Gbps connection to each home.

“In Calix’s case with this particular ONT, they basically are trying to set a bit of a benchmark for the market, saying this is what they feel will be the de facto standard for ONTs in terms of what it needs to support on the customer side,” said Teresa Mastrangelo, Principal Analyst with broadbandtrends. “And while they don’t expect the bandwidth demands are going to reach 1 Gbps anytime soon, it’s more of a future-ready type platform to make sure that the operators who deploy it know it’s going to meet all their capacity needs as services and bandwidth requirements evolve.”
 

Calix’s new ONT is not just about delivering raw bandwidth, however. The 700G also allows service providers to select the additional features they require for their own applications, including RF video, T1 interfaces, additional voice and Ethernet ports, and HPNA v3 for home network IP over coax cable.

In addition, the ONT has built-in intelligence that auto-detects the OLT’s bandwidth and supports three modes: 622 Mbps BPON, 1.2 Mbps GPON, or 1.2 to 2.5 GPON.  The end result is that a service provider can migrate to GPON in a migratory fashion.

 
The MDU factor
In addition to single-family homes, the 700G can support MDU (multi- dwelling unit) environments.  The 700G platforms includes up to 4 POTS interfaces on SFU (single family unit) models and up to 16 on MDU models.  Targeting MDUs with fiber-to-the-x, especially in the U.S. where the buildings are often older, poses many challenges for the service provider. Not only do service providers face challenging installation environments, they also have to face the reality that the property owner may have an existing relationship with another provider, which is typically the cable company.

 
“There’s so many deployment options that depend on the size of the building, the size of the apartment, so it’s a daunting task to address the MDU market,” Mastrangelo said. “Similar to single-family homes, there’s many more variations on MDUs, particularly when you’re addressing business services. The challenges we have seen in the MDU market is because there’s no simple cookie-cutter solution for that.”

ONT Bonanza
Calix’s 700G is one of many new products to emerge in the ONT segment in recent months.  Thus far, Calix’s GPON ONT efforts are paying off. According to new research from the Dell’Oro Group, Calix has shipped 200,000 GPON ONTs to North American service providers.  Overall, the drive by both incumbent vendors (Tellabs and Alcatel/Lucent) and emerging vendors (Calix, Occam Networks, and Zhone) is a response to the service provider’s ongoing FTTX drive. This means that providers in the US and abroad deploying FTTX are finding that the diversity of single-family and MDU environments will require ONTs that can accommodate these network scenarios.

“There are more operators that jumping on the bandwagon to deploy fiber, so that’s clearly driving a lot of these new ONT announcements,” Mastrangelo said. “In many cases, these ONTs that we’re seeing vendors announce were designed specifically to meet the needs of a specific operator and saying if so and so likes this, there’s other operators that have similar needs.”
 

back