Hitachi Intros GPON System

Hitachi Ltd. and Hitachi Telecom (USA) Inc. today are unveiling a standards-based GPON product for the North American market.

Hitachi’s GPON solutions provide data rates of 2.4gbps downstream and 1.2gbps upstream, the maximum speeds defined by the ITU-T G.984 standards and FSAN recommendations.

“We believe we’re ahead of the pack as far as having commercially available GPON products,” says David Foote, Hitachi Telecom CTO, explaining that the new AMN1220 products will be shipping in volume in the first quarter of next year. The company already has sold some of the systems, however, and at least on of the systems will be deployed by the end of this year, says Foote, with a multicity CLEC.

The AMN1220 consists of a centrally located optical line terminal (OLT) connected via single-mode fiber optic cable to optical network terminals (ONT) at the subscribers' premises. The OLT is equipped with a hybrid Layer 2/3 + TDM switch fabric for flexible traffic management and consolidation. ONTs include the SFU, a single family / small business unit, and the MXU, a configurable multi-dwelling / multi-business ONT.

The AMN1220 supports triple play services, including integrated bandwidth management and QoS capabilities. It also has optional support for RF video.

Foote notes that the new Hitachi products also support GPON Encapsulation Mode (GEM) framing, allowing TDM services such as T1 to be handled in their native formats. That means service providers can support both new and existing services over GPON connections, he adds. “So we believe that’s an important combination,” he says.

Additionally, the AMN1220 delivers gigabit Ethernet line rate speeds, so the Ethernet ports on the ONTs don’t get choked up by the high access speeds.

Through experience with BPON, “service providers have become sensitive about making sure when you deliver Ethernet, that you really support the full capacity of it, because service providers also want to use PON to deliver services to enterprise customers,” Foote says. “All our ONT premises [gear] supports gigE, which can run at full line rate gigE.” That will be important as service providers move to offer VLAN services over these GPON connections, he says. Supporting gigE line rates means service providers can offer a business customer a “bronze” level of (lower rate) service at the start and then over time can deliver a more premium service – and upgrade the customer to that higher-rate service with just a remote software change.

Foote says Hitachi is uniquely positioned with this new PON solution given its is the world’s No. 1 PON vendor. The company has nearly 1 million lines of BPON deployed in Asia and Japan. “That means we’re already in mass production of PON technology. So we’re way ahead of the curve. Nobody else is in that position on PON,” he says.

While Foote would not specific pricing on Hitachi’s new GPON solution, he says it is “only incrementally more expensive than BPON, which is reported to be in the range of $300 to $400 per line in high volume, $500 to $700 per line in low volume.”

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines