With the exception of rival Flexlight Networks, Optical Solutions had the gigabit passive optical networking (GPON) equipment market all to itself until Alcatel announced its entry into the space in late May. Optical Solutions’ executive vice president of marketing John Griffin spoke with Telephony’s Ed Gubbins about GPON and beyond.

On the move to GPON: When we got into GPON, it was around our commitment to IPTV. We were a BPON supplier. We went to GPON because we felt IPTV was an application the telcos needed to be successful. We felt it would take a while for other folks to catch up, and essentially that’s happening. They finally figured out what we figured out two years ago. At the end of the day, we’re just more experienced than anybody here.

On Supercomm: At Supercomm, you’re going to have everybody and his brother and sister announcing GPON. I suspect three or four other chip guys will announce. Alcatel, Tellabs, probably Lucent--all the big players. And then the wannabes: Entrisphere, Calix, Zhone... They’re all going to announce GPON, which I think is great. It just validates that we’re right. Yippy skippy. This is looking like a real market now. That’s good news for OSI. At Supercomm, we’re announcing our 30th customer for IPTV. [Laughs.] We think about 90% of the world’s IPTV over PON is our customers. We’re also demonstrating HDTV at Supercomm. We’re running it at 20 Mb/s, and we don’t have any problem with that. We don’t see any of our customers having a problem with that on their existing networks.

On Broadlight’s May introduction of a GPON “system on a chip”: I think it’s somewhat ironic, Broadlight claiming they’ve got this system-on-a-chip thing. What do you think we’ve been doing? We’ve got our own SoC we’ve developed that’s served us well, and we think it’s going to serve us well moving forward. The bigger [system vendors] want to use merchant chips. We could debate this, frankly, but at the end of the day, with fiber-to-the-home, it’s not clear to us that buying merchant chips can make you competitive. We’re open to buying Broadlight’s chips if it’s at the right price point and gives our customers the features we think we need. But when do we really think those systems guys will have those chips integrated into system products? Late in the second or third quarter, maybe even the second half of next year to be really shippable. We think we’re a rare duck here; we’re actually making money in fiber-to-the-home. We don’t think a lot of people are. We’ve done that because we’re somewhat vertically integrated around these chip sets. We’ve continued to add to these chip sets features and functions based on real-world experience in deploying these systems. We’re offering customers--and seeing them embrace--Layer 3 capabilities in the chip sets. Most of the DSL guys are using Layer 2.

On the request for information on GPON issued by three Bells: The GPON standard has got a lot of room to grow. FSAN’s going through a debate. There’s a lot of movement around something called the common technical spec, which won’t be out until the fourth quarter. That’s the issue with this RFI: what flavor of the GPON standard would [the Bells] want to do high-volume deployment on. This RFI was really around trying to understand the cost tradeoffs and technical tradeoffs.

On Bell business: At the end of the day, we’re focused on the small carriers and municipalities. The more I watch folks like Alcatel, Lucent, Tellabs, those players--as the industry consolidates, it’s so difficult for them to pay attention to those smaller [customers] because they have to pay attention to the SBCs and Verizons of the world. That’s the only thing that moves their needle. I don’t believe the RBOCs are going to buy from us directly. But we’re a leader in this space. I want to help the Tier 1 players do what’s right for their customers, and I can translate that easily to our customers.

On speed: Right now we’re using 1.2 Gb/s down, 622 Mb/s up. We felt that’s more than enough bandwidth for all our customers and is also at a very good cost point. There’s a possibility [the standards] will go to 2.4 Gb/s down, 1.2 Gb/s up. We’ve taken that into consideration in our product roadmap. We’ve got a plan to be the first one there with actual shippable products if that’s the way the standard goes. I’ve heard Alcatel is going to demonstrate 2.4/1.2 at Supercomm, but demonstrating and shipping--come on, give me a break. I believe the pressure for higher speeds is Verizon and SBC trying to be very conservative, with the knowledge that they can drive costs down because of their volume. It’s the classic RBOCs with belts and suspenders. They don’t want to take a chance. They don’t know enough to make an informed decision, in my view. They’ve never deployed IPTV; how can they understand what the bandwidth needs are? As the RBOCs go forward with their buying power, they’re trying to get a sense of, if we went to a higher speed, how could that impact the reach of the product, essentially the optical budget. Should we run the standard as capable of 2.4 Gb/s symmetrical? Should we implement that now or do it later? They were querying all of us suppliers as to the economic tradeoffs between each of these speeds and what the technical risks are and what it would cost them to upgrade or replace the BPON. The same discussion occurred at FSAN about four or five months ago, without a lot of resolution, frankly. I think [the RFI] was the big folks in North America trying to get additional detail.