Occam enters GPON market through acquisition

Occam Networks plans to start shipping its first gigabit passive optical networking (GPON) gear in the second quarter, benefiting from an acquisition it made last year.

Occam completed its $5.3-million acquisition of GPON vendor Terawave last fall, taking on nearly 30 new employees (including 22 engineers) but no “meaningful” fourth-quarter revenue.

The integration of Terawave’s GPON technology with Occam’s broadband loop carrier platforms should relieve some recent pressure on the company. In November, Occam attributed revenue declines in part to its rural telco customers (now 273 in number) migrating from copper to fiber access networks more quickly than expected.

Going forward, Occam expects its GPON gear to achieve sales parity with its current active Ethernet products relatively quickly, helping to drive overall revenue growth in the back half of this year.

“We expect that toward the back half of the year, things will stabilize that it’s about half-and-half point-to-point gigabit Ethernet fiber-to-the-home and PON to the home shipping from us, all in the same platform,” said Bob Howard Anderson, Occam’s chief executive officer.

When asked in a quarterly earnings call on Wednesday about the mix of passive and active access architectures Occam expected to see demand for in the market in the long term, Howard Anderson said, “We’re seeing broad demand from our customers for a hybrid of those constructions. It has to do with the level of service a provider wants to provide as well as the geographic density of homes or endpoints they’re serving. We’ll be doing both gigabit point-to-point Ethernet as well as PON in the same platform alongside where copper services are being deployed, all backhauled over 10 Gb/s Ethernet.”

Occam has already begun work on new optical network terminals (the customer premises gear in FTTH networks) that will aim to lower the costs of the products. Those should be released starting next year.