After abandoning the passive optical networking (PON) market three years ago, NEC America has thrown its hat into the ring of equipment vendors selling Gigabit PON (GPON) gear.

The company’s SpectraWave line of GPON fiber access gear will be available in the second quarter, including an optical line terminal (OLT), an optical network terminal (ONT) and an optical network unit (ONU), for serving multiple customers with VDSL. Like most of the market’s newer GPON products, NEC’s gear will offer 2.4 Gb/s of downstream traffic and 1.2 Mb/s upstream, as specified by the International Telecommunications Union’s FSAN group. They will support both IPTV and RF video and will include options for GEM-based encapsulation.

According to Rich Moran, marketing manager of NEC America’s optical division, interoperability of the company’s GPON gear with that of other vendors is a priority, allowing carriers to deploy NEC’s OLT with a competitor’s ONT, for example, and vice versa.

Service management is another particular focus for the company’s efforts here, he said, and can be performed either in the ONT, the OLT or a combination of both. In that way, carriers can mix and match NEC’s GPON gear with other vendors’ and use whichever service management system they prefer.

The company is pursuing the GPON request for proposals issued jointly by BellSouth, AT&T (then SBC) and Verizon Communications in November, Moran confirmed, but he declined to say whether the company is pursuing that business solo or with a partner.

“The interoperability aspects of [NEC’s GPON gear] make it very easy for us to partner with big players in the space,” Moran said.

NEC has been out of the PON market for years, having stopped development on its PON line in late 2002 and sold its spun-out access subsidiary, NEC Eluminant, to Zhone Technologies in early 2003. Meanwhile, the company has had traction with its IP DSLAM gear in Europe and Asia.