ANAHEIM--For a technology that most people agree is years away from acceptance by North American carriers, wavelength-division multiplexing passive optical networks (WDM-PON) kept coming up in discussions at the Optical Fiber Communications conference this week.

“WDM-PON is probably going to accelerate faster than anyone thought a year ago, or even a few months ago,” said John Dexheimer,partner at FirstAnalysis Private Equity. Citing the heuristic that technologies in general take nearly a decade to reach 50% penetration, Dexheimer pointed to expectations that fiber-based broadband technology could achieve 20% to 30% penetration five years from now. WDM-PON deployment may be the wave that follows it.

In a keynote speech at OFC, Verizon Communications announced the commencement of commercial gigabit PON (GPON) deployment and alluded to a WDM-PON future. GPON will be Verizon’s preferred fiber access technology starting next year, said Mark Wegleitner, the company’s chief technology officer, “until something better comes along.”

“We’re already working with suppliers, doing investigations, looking 3, 5, 7 years out, trying to understand what the best technology will be,” he said, though he also told Telephony, “We’re not counting on [WDM-PON] in our network for another 3 to 5 years.”

Korea Telecom has deployed some WDM-PON from Novera Optics. Another component vendor, Ignis Photonics, exhibited at OFC but didn’t demonstrate its WDM-PON at the show. The company didn’t explicitly say why but hinted that its system partners, Nortel Networks and LG, may have influenced the decision. Another vendor, Pirelli Systems, displayed its own CWDM-based PON system at the show.

At one panel discussion, one audience member, citing the popularity of EPON in Asia and that of GPON elsewhere, asked if both camps will eventually migrate to WDM-PON. The panelists puzzled over the question before Tony Bates, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Systems’ service provider routing technology group, said the question illustrated one of the reasons his company hasn’t played much in the access space. “This is one area we don’t believe will converge for many, many years,” he said.