The 10Gig EPON Study Group website has been updated with contents of the meeting held at Austin, TX last week. The study group has voted that a Project Authorization Request (PAR) be submitted in the next IEEE Plenary Session at July.
LightReading today has an interesting article about Immenstar, a startup, joining the EPON market. Immenstar has been operating in stealth mode for over two years. LightReading also mentions that Immenstar claims to have a multimillion dollar order due next month, possibly from UTStarComm which sells equipment to Softbank BB Corp for the deployment of Yahoo Broadband Service in Japan. UTStarComm previously used Passave (acquired by PMC-Sierra) chipsets but that didnt work very well as many of Passave chips had errors. The news article is available here.
The product portfolio of Immenstar is very interesting, it offers a Quad OLT chip with integrates 4 OLT ports and 4 Gigabit Ethernet ports with Non Blocking Switching. The company website mentions that the MuLan EPON Switch Chipset provides a carrier-class Ethernet ultrabroadband access solutions for network operators and service providers. It offers quality of service, fault tolerant operating system, hot swap capability, scalability, and high density system for the EPON access network.
It is interesting to see a startup in the EPON area, as there are already a bunch of companies competing for limited marketplace. EPON seems to be growing primarily in Japan and Korea while North America seems to be moving towards the GFP-PON market. And although different EPON chipset vendors promise to deliver quality of service, technologically there doesn’t seem to be anything different that Immenstar has to offer compared to existing chipsets in the marketplace.
Furukawa has developed a EPON ONU with a GBIC (Gigabit Interface Converter) form-factor based on Teknovus’ TK3713 ONU chip. I believe that this is an important development for the EPON as it facilitates the expansion of the traditional Ethernet communications equipment manufacturers into the EPON market, and thus leverages one of the biggest advantages of the EPON — the ubiquity of Ethernet. This should help penetrate the EPON technology in Fiber-to-the-Business (FTTB) because of easy integration of the local LAN with the EPON.
Any comments on potential customers of Furukawa?
Chelsio announced that it would support Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Scalable Networking Pack on its line of 10Gb Ethernet networking solutions. The focus is on improving the efficiency of network protocol processing on Windows Server 2003 which frees up networking-related central processing unit (CPU) overhead resulting in a boost to overall system performance and a reduction of system bottlenecks.
Details are available in the press release here.
There has been a lot of discussion on the net on the recent announcement by Bay Microsystems that it is developing a new network processor that can cut the costs of 10 Gig EThernet to $400 a port and 1 Gig Ethernet to $40 a port. Details on the news are available here.
Zhone today announced its EtherActive Product to deliver high bandwidth Ethernet services over fiber in FTTP/FTTH markets. Zhone’s EtherActive Optical Line Terminal (OLT) can support up to 10 subscribers per blade with 10/100/1000 Mbps service over either copper or single/dual mode fiber utilizing industry-standard EFM technology.
Active Ethernet has been chosen as an alternative high bandwidth solution to the Passive Optical Network (PON) in many parts of the world such as the city of Amsterdam. The main difference between the two is that while active ethernet is a point-to-point architecture, the PON is a tree-and-branch shared architecture while helps decrease fiber cost and share a channel/wavelength amongst multiple users.
A nice informative discussion between Active and Passive Ethernet is available at:
http://www.xchangemag.com/articles/661feature11.html
hiamitabha
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