Sales of broadband passive optical networking (BPON) equipment are “tanking” as higher-speed GPON gear enters the market, according to a report this week from Infonetics Research.

Global spending on BPON gear will drop 33% this year to $197 million, Infonetics said. By 2009, it will be just $30 million.

Meanwhile, the overall market for PON equipment is growing rapidly, driven by GPON and Ethernet-based EPON. Sales of central office and customer premises PON gear grew 71% last year to $965 million. By 2010 it will reach nearly $2.4 billion.

“Verizon [Communications] is the last big BPON purchaser,” said Jeff Heynen, Infonetics analyst. “They will begin to shift their [spending] from BPON to GPON beginning around the middle of this year.”

Last month Verizon, which began an aggressive BPON deployment in 2004, announced it would launch its first commercial GPON deployment in this year’s second quarter, doing the same in a second market this summer. Verizon will continue deploying BPON this year, but by next year, GPON will be its technology of choice for fiber-to-the-premises access networks.