Access equipment maker Wave 7 Optics today said it has added Gigabit Passive Optical Network capabilities to its Trident7 Universal Access Platform. The new GPON functions meet International Telecommunications Union standard G.984.

The Trident7 already supports the Ethernet PON standard, developed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, known as IEEE802.3ah Ethernet in the First Mile, said Bill Bryan, Wave 7 vice president of product management. By adding standards-based GPON capability, the Trident7 offers greater deployment flexibility for service providers, he said.

“GPON gives you more bandwidth, but EPON is widely deployed today, so due to those economies of scale, there are cost advantages to EPON, Bryan said. “As GPON starts to mature, the costs will be the same. So it comes down to what your philosophy is in deploying.”

Service providers may choose the ITU GPON standard because of what the tight adherence to traditional Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) requirements enables on the network management side, he said, or they may want the flexibility of using the IEEE standard and Simple Network Management Protocol.

Offering both technologies on the same platform also enables service providers to mix and match business and consumer offerings, giving each what is most appropriate, Bryan added.

“It is all managed from a single element management system, using the same overarching software to control it,” he said. “And we install it hitless so you don’t have to take the system down to put a card in. The only thing that changes is the type of card.”

Trident7 also supports a diverse set of Optical Network Terminals.