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Posted on 11.01.05
The controversy over the implementation costs of GPON vs. GEPON rages on. The latest salvo has been fired by Bill Huang, CTO of UTStarcom (a telecom equipment manufacturer, GEPON terminals included). According to the article: Whereas early ATM-based PON deployments factored out several thousand dollars per subscriber, carriers can now deploy GEPON for well under $500 per subscriber. Lower costs, in turn, reduce the overall capital expenditure a carrier incurs when transitioning to a high-bandwidth PON architecture. Even though Bill emphasizes that "early" ATM-based PON deployments (i.e. BPON) are several thousand dollars per subscriber, the implication here is that GEPON is still less expensive to deploy than GPON. The article goes on to describe the advantages of deploying VoIP and IPTV over GEPON and then delves into GEPON for business (which I presume will be a big market opportunity for PON): Corporate CIOs are discovering the cost savings of VOIP, which comes with little or no sacrifice in voice quality or reliability. Videoconferencing too has a natural synergy with GEPON, taking advantage of the 1 Gbps symmetric line rate. With GEPON, CIOs can finally collapse their individual T1s for PBX, corporate WAN, and Internet access, as well as their legacy ISDN BRIs for corporate videoconferencing, onto an optical Ethernet link provided by a cutting-edge service provider.
Filed under: Business and Technology and Standards Comments: 2 Comments »RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI Leave a commentLine and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: |
I received this email from a reader in response to this post:
We are currently seeing 1 port ONUs coming out of Asia in the 300-350 dollar range.
Weve been approached by contract mfgs who have offered EFM standard boards 1 Ethernet port for $70.00 in volumes
so you can see the trend.We are continually lowering our cost basis and in the 400-500 range - once we go EFM standard chipsets we will interoperate with these low cost ONUS and then sell our ONUs when they need higher port density
TDM, RF etc.
Comment by Administrator — November 3, 2005 @ 9:01 am
The fact is, GE-PON is at volume, is growing, and dramatically cheaper today. Further, innovation continues to bring more and more functionality into the solutions at lower and lower costs. GPON is going to be a great technology and solution for FTTH but realistically is 2 years behind GE-PON. It will benefit from some of the GE-PON innovation, but still has to lock down the standards, get Optics to meet the specs at a reliable cost, get field deployments, and then get to volume.
Comment by Mark Abrams — November 4, 2005 @ 12:25 pm