Zhone Moves into Fiber Access

“I read in a UBS Warburg report that at least one big cable company plans to offer voice to all of its customers by year end 2004,” says David Markowitz, vice president of marketing for Zhone. “If you’re a telco, that just has to be really scary.”

Zhone’s new Single Line Multi-Service (SLMS) technology, which includes products for both residential and business deployments, represent Zhone’s entree into the passive optical networking/fiber line side business. The company says the “media agnostic” approach of the SLMS architecture allows carriers to use existing copper loops and outside plant facilities for rapid deployment while progressively evolving to a fiber-based buildout.

New products available under the SLMS heading include an optical line terminal card that fits into Zhone’s existing Multiple Access Line Concentrator (MALC). The new MALC PON OLT line cards enable field upgrades to new highbandwidth optical services in addition to a wide range of broadband and narrowband copperbased services.

The new PON solution offers either IP or ATM uplinks including T1/E1 IMA, DS3, E3, OC3, STM1, OC12, STM4, 10BaseT, 100BaseT, and gigabit Ethernet. In addition to PON and DSL services, Zhone’s SLMS architecture supports narrowband/voice and special services.

The Zhone Residential Gateway (ZRG), meanwhile, combines the functions of a modem, router and integrated access device in a single unit that resides either indoors or outdoors at the customer premises. From a single fiber input, the ZRG delivers up to four POTS voice ports, fast Ethernet and RF video over the subscribers existing inside wiring. It works with existing inside wiring and CPE.

The FiberJack, for enterprise subscribers, provides carriers with a PON demarcation and test access point which interfaces to their customers’ existing CPE.

Markowitz notes the ability to work with customers’ existing CPE and service is key, given their investment and comfort level with existing services.

Subscribers and services under the new architecture are all managed with the Zhone Management System (ZMS) — a common flowthrough provisioning and management platform that integrates into existing OSS systems. Zhone’s ZMS is OSMINE certified.

The new products are expected to be generally available this quarter. Markowitz would not disclose the names of trial customers at press time.

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