The road to GPON is about to be paved.

BellSouth, SBC Communications and Verizon have notified vendors to expect an RFP for Gigabit Passive Optical Networking technology in November, helping to immediately put that technology on the launch pad for 2006.

According to spokesman for both BellSouth and SBC, the three companies sent out a letter of intent that announced plans to issue a GPON RFP later this year.

"The letter of intent was sent to a host of companies - 50 or 60 vendors," the SBC spokesman said. "That includes OEMs, chip makers and the full range of companies involved. We outlined what we are looking at, in terms of GPON, and stated that we are considering issuing a joint RFP later this year."

Neither spokesman could confirm the November date for the RFP.

The announcement is not a huge surprise – Verizon CTO Mark A. Wegleitner has stated publicly that his company will deploy GPON in 2006 – and the three companies have successfully worked as a JPC in the past on major technology initiatives. One outcome of that work is to jumpstart technology by giving vendors a clear goal. This decision means, however, that the three Bell companies are skipping over Ethernet PON or EPON to go to the much faster GPON.

“If there was any doubt in the industry that EPON had a potential play in the RBOCs’ network, this lays that to rest,” said Daniel Briere, CEO of the TeleChoice consultancy. “We had been saying all along that 2006 was the year that GPON is going to hit. This is being driven by the fact that IPTV is going to happen, it is going to happen really soon, and they are going to need the bandwidth to do it.”

Microsoft’s IPTV software, in particular, requires additional bandwidth to support channel changes, Briere said.

Although a Bell company RFP for GPON could significantly advance that technology, it won't necessarily halt development or deployment of other FTTH options, said Michael Render, president of Render, Vanderslice & Associates, and an FTTH analyst and consultant.

"The general move has been toward higher end solutions away from PON to EPON, GPON and active point to point systems," he said. "The jury is still out as to how those will play out. All of those solutions will contiueto have a role in the next decade in the U.S."

GPON as a standard was initiated by FSAN – the same group of carriers and vendors who launched ATM-based BPON – in 2001, as a means of standardizing service delivery at 1 gigabit per second and up. The GPON standard enables the transmission of TDM and data traffic in their native formats for additional efficiencies.