Alcatel has added a GPON platform to its family of ISAM IP access products. The new Alcatel 7342, which is based on the recently released ITU G.984.x standard, is the first standards-compliant GPON solution on the market, says Matt James, Alcatel’s senior manager of access product marketing.
The 7342 delivers 2.4gbps of bandwidth downstream and 1.2gbps of capacity upstream (one of the upstream/downstream bandwidth options defined in G.984.x), which James says is twice as powerful as any other PON solution now on the market. The 7342 also has OMCI (ONT management control interface) capabilities, which are defined in G.984.x, that allow the device to control optical network terminals at subscriber homes.
James says GPON will offer carriers tremendous bandwidth for both guaranteed and variable-rate applications. That’s key for IPTV services, which will enable telcos to differentiate their offerings from the cable companies, he says.
The 7342 is expected to be in lab trials starting in the second half of this year, with general availability following those trials. James declined to provide the names of carriers that had signed on to do trials of the 7342, but said two service providers are planning such trials.
Alcatel also will be running Microsoft TV services over all its access and transport products in a live demonstration at SUPERCOMM next week.
Last September Alcatel announced its ISAM family of products, for which the vendor now has 25 million lines under contract. Among the customers of Alcatel’s ISAM fiber-to-the-node products are BellSouth, China Telecom, SBC Communications Inc. and many others. While based on the same architecture as Alcatel’s previously released ISAM platforms, the 7342 is an entirely separate platform, rather than simply a new blade to the existing ISAM solutions.
The vendor also offers a BPON-based solution called the 7340, but that is not within the ISAM product line because BPON is an ATM rather than an IP technology, explains James. However, he adds, customers of Alcatel’s 7340 BPON solution can migrate to the GPON-based 7342 solution with new network cards that will run both GPON and BPON on the same platform.
