NEC America Releases 2.4gbps GPON Access Products

NEC America Inc. is the latest in a stream of manufacturers to announce it can enable service providers to bring 2.4gbps speeds to end users with its new SpectralWave GPON access products.

The solution, which consists of the AM Series Optical Line Terminal (OLT) and ME Series Optical Network Units (ONU) and terminals (ONT), will be generally available early second quarter.

“Just a generation ago, NEC was deploying 2.4[gbps] high-speed links in subsea, transpacific applications,” said Rich Moran, director of marketing for NEC America. “Now, we have advanced and moved optical performance and speed from subsea application, terrestrial backbone, down to the distribution part of the network and now, it’s all the way down to the broadband subscriber interface.”

The ITU-T G.984 standard is a key enabler to NEC’s continuing effort to push cost-effective optical networks out to the subscriber, Moran said.

There are no GPON deployments in North America, but the Bells issued a RFP for the technology last fall. Moran did not confirm that NEC is answering the RFP but said the company is working with carriers on evaluations of its system for deployments expected this year. While the manufacturer is targeting Tier 1 providers that have aggressive video delivery plans, Moran said Tier 2s, IOCs and even municipalities likely will consider the technology – since it offers higher capacity and a higher split rate than has been available in the access space previously. While normally passive networks have a one-to-32 split, GPON is capable of twice that – one-to-64, which helps carriers to avoid costs of deploying terminal equipment.

“It’s a new challenge to maintain cost-effectiveness and performance to deliver a high bit rate all the way out to the access,” said Moran. NEC has drawn from its experience with PON and also multiservice broadband access over copper.

For example, Moran said NEC built the system to be flexible to transition from deployments with tens of OLTs serving thousands of subscribers to thousands of OLTs serving millions of subscribers.

To do this, NEC has made the OLTs capable of handling call control and service management internally or interfacing with upper layer systems telcos may already have in place. In a dense deployment where telcos tend to take a centralized approach, NEC’s OLTs interface with existing systems. In contrast, an IOC that doesn’t require such scale and likely does not have the centralized service management system would use the embedded capabilities in the OLT, he explained.

NEC also has made its system interoperable with other vendors’ equipment. Moran would not disclose those vendors. In addition, NEC has embedded bandwidth and service management capabilities into the ONT so that when it is deployed on the subscriber side with an earlier generation OLT – made by NEC or another vendor – on the network side, it can act as an upgrade.

Moran said while the 2.4gbps GPON system offers four times the speed of the BPON, the cost of the system is increasing about 10-15 percent on a per-line basis. Because the OLT can be shared, he said, about 70 percent of the per-line cost is in the ONT.

The non-blocking AM Series OLT platform scales to more than 3,000 subscribers per shelf.

The ME Series products include a modular ONU platform with configurable subscriber interface types for MDU and MTU deployments as well as a variety of ONT types to address a spectrum of service scenarios, from single-family Internet access and IPTV to home-office models.

NEC America Inc. www.necamerica.com

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