When it comes to fiber-to-the-home and GPON, Verizon is the big enchilada. That’s why so many in the industry are closely watching the company’s activities in this space. Now rumors have surfaced that the company may be looking for other or additional GPON suppliers.

However, Verizon spokesman Mark Marchand last week told me the company is on track with its GPON plans. “Our CTO announced at the OFC Conference earlier this year that over the summer we would have two first office applications with GPON equipment from Alcatel-Lucent, which we announced to be first out the box, in Louisville, Texas, and Kirkland, Penn.,” said Marchand. “Those as announced are well under way. And we are getting ready to make additional announcements on general availability deployment of GPON before the end of the year.”

Any commercial deployments by Verizon of GPON this year will be based on the Alcatel-Lucent gear, according to Marchand. The plans to use GPON gear from Motorola and Tellabs, Verizon’s other two previously-announced GPON vendors, are “to be determined,” he said. “We’re completing testing, field testing, with them. Then we’ll make that announcement [about] when we go to general availability with them,” he added.

That may be why rumors have surfaced that Verizon is having problems relating to its GPON secondary suppliers Motorola and Tellabs. “I had heard there were issues with both Tellabs’ and Motorola’s equipment,” an analyst who asked not to be named tells xchange.

But Verizon’s Marchand indicated that isn’t the case and offered a reminder that it was always the telco’s plan to use Alcatel-Lucent GPON gear first. Tellabs declined to comment, and Motorola did not respond to xchange’s request for a comment.

Despite Verizon’s first office applications of GPON this year, Jeff Heynen, directing analyst of broadband and IPTV at Infonetics Research, says it appears Verizon won’t commercially deploy GPON gear in a significant way until early next year. If that is the case, Verizon will have pushed its GPON deployment plans “back just a little,” explains Heynen, who says Verizon initially had prepped expectations that it begin commercial GPON rollouts in the second or third quarter of this year.

Heynen says that small pushback is likely just the result of working with a new technology and the fact that Verizon’s FTTP plan is so strategic it wants to be sure to get it right the first time. On the other hand, there have been rumblings that Verizon is looking to add another GPON ONT because its not getting the interoperability it desires from the other three vendors’ solutions, says Heynen.

If that’s true, he says, it would explain why Verizon is still ordering so much BPON gear from Tellabs. According to Heynen, Tellabs’ North American revenue in 2Q07 for BPON gear was approximately $62 million, whereas in the first quarter it was closer to $56 million and in 4Q06 was $48 million. Of that, Heynen estimates that 90 percent of that revenue comes from Verizon. When asked to confirm that data, Tellabs spokeswoman Ariana Nikitas told xchange that the vendor doesn’t push BPON-specific data for competitive reasons.

Verizon’s Marchand responded by commenting that how much BPON equipment the company is ordering is immaterial to the pace of its GPON plans because the service provider is continuing to deploy BPON to meet its commitment to pass 3 million homes a year with fiber. “Even when we start GPON, in general availability it isn’t everywhere, and we’ll still be using BPON equipment for some time,” he added.

Whether or not Verizon does have serious concerns about its GPON selections or is on the lookout for other or addition vendors, Teresa Mastrangelo, principal analyst at broadbandtrends.com, says that Tellabs’ GPON solution is less than elegant and that its size and complexity may be presenting Verizon with certain implementation challenges.

“The [Tellabs’ GPON] product itself was probably a bit of overkill because it was based on a very high-capacity routing platform,” says Mastrangelo. “It had a lot a functionally, which I think was above and beyond what was necessary for the GPON. It’s a huge product too. It was just physically large and very different in how it would be deployed. So from a method and procedures perspective, if you’re talking about a product that has not only GPON but, say, could replace other network elements, that sounds really good in a story, but from an operations point of view that can be very troubling, especially when different craftspeople have responsibility for different parts of the network.”