Verizon Announces More GPON Deployments

Verizon continues to add GPON equipment to its FiOS network, the company announced this week. The service provider says it has begun initial deployment of GPON in its new FTTP build areas in California, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas and Virginia.

That’s in addition to Verizon’s first office applications of Alcatel-Lucent GPON gear in Louisville, Texas, and Kirkland, Penn., announced at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference & Exposition and the National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference in March 2007. Verizon now says an early deployment of GPON in Hingham, Mass., was also part of the early GPON effort.

Alcatel-Lucent will supply the GPON gear for these additional locations as well, which squares with what Verizon indicated during an interview with xchange in September.

Infonetics Research analyst Jeff Heynen told xchange this morning that while the GPON news from Verizon this week is just the continuation of the earlier-announced strategy by the carrier, he is a bit surprised by the breadth of states the service provider announced for GPON, although he noted that the new gear will be used only in very targeted, greenfield applications in certain locales.

In addition to Alcatel-Lucent, Verizon earlier named Motorola and Tellabs as its GPON vendors. In September, Verizon told xchange that it was completing testing on the gear from the latter two GPON suppliers; however, rumors had been swirling in late 2007 that Verizon was struggling with the GPON gear from at least one of these two suppliers. In fact, Teresa Mastrangelo, principal analyst at broadbandtrends.com, last fall told xchange that Tellabs’ GPON solution is less than elegant and its size and complexity may be presenting Verizon with certain implementation challenges. That had led some other GPON suppliers, like Hitachi, to hold out hope that they might get a piece of Verizon’s GPON business, the largest such opportunity in the industry to date by far.

Until its limited recent deployments of GPON, Verizon has used BPON (broadband passive optical network) gear for its FTTP builds. However, the carrier said the GPON equipment can increase the line-rate bandwidth on the Verizon FTTP network by four times downstream to the customer and eight times upstream back to the network.

“I think in light of Brian Roberts’ spin session yesterday on making the coax do more, GPON is evidence that the all-fiber network is essentially limitless in terms of bandwidth and a huge strategic advantage for Verizon,” Jim Smith, director of media relations at Verizon Telecom, wrote to xchange in an e-mail Wednesday morning, referring to the Comcast Chairman and CEO’s keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. “Estimates are that bandwidth demand will increase 10 times every three to four years, which means an open high end will be what we need in the network. So GPON matters.”

In separate but related news, Verizon this week also announced that FiOS TV service is now available to more than 500,000 households, and the company announced plans to expand the service to 1 million homes by the end of this year, in Southern California, including Downey, Santa Fe Springs, La Mirada and Norwalk. Verizon also has won approval from the Public Utilities Commission to offer the service in 34 more California communities.

And Verizon has launched FiOS TV in New Jersey in about 100 communities. As of today, the company’s FiOS TV and broadband network passes more than 1 million New Jersey homes in about 270 communities in 15 counties, with more to come.

Verizon Communications Inc. www.verizon.com

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