Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) today announced that its 10G gigabit passive optical network (GPON) prototype has received the FTTH Council’s Innovation Award in the “Technological and Technical Innovation” category. The Award’s jury thus gives an important signal to the worldwide fiber community: although 10G GPON volume deployments are only expected to materialize in a few years from now, it is crucial for the industry to prove today that 10G GPON is the right way forward for evolving current GPON networks – through 10G GPON’s co-existence with its 2.5G predecessor.

Service providers operate in a highly competitive environment. Their fundamental business strategy for growing market share is to offer the highest bandwidth to end-users at an attractive price. As a result, many service providers are making huge investments in GPON networks; but at the same time, they need to ensure these networks can smoothly evolve to the next level. Alcatel-Lucent believes that the time is right to take a look into the future, and explore 10G GPON technology and migration paths.

In 2009, Alcatel-Lucent developed a 10G GPON optical network terminal (ONT) and line card. This was publicly announced and demonstrated at Broadband World Forum Europe 2009, in combination with Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile technology. Alcatel-Lucent has thus been the first vendor to demonstrate next-generation wireline and wireless access convergence, with its 10G GPON platform providing 10 Gbps downstream and 2.5 Gbps upstream capacity.

As a matter of fact, initial 10G GPON deployments will target not only residential users - but will also enable some specific applications such as LTE mobile backhaul. After all, mobile data services are growing exponentially and this trend will continue as 3G networks evolve to LTE. 10G GPON allows service providers to reduce the escalating operation costs of legacy mobile backhaul – all while offering a wide range of next-generation consumer applications that will be new sources of revenue. This is fully in line with Alcatel-Lucent’s Application Enablement vision and High Leverage Network™ framework.

“We are very pleased to receive the first-ever FTTH Council Innovation Award, recognizing that Alcatel-Lucent is at the forefront of developing cutting-edge technologies long before they are standardized,” says Dave Geary, President of Alcatel-Lucent’s wireline networks activities. “The industry anticipates that 10G GPON standards will be ratified in the next couple of months, and we expect to have a commercial product shortly thereafter that will smoothly co-exist with today’s GPON technology.”

Alcatel-Lucent is the worldwide leader in fixed broadband access, supporting the largest mass deployments of video, voice and data services. Today, one out of three fixed broadband subscribers around the world is served through an access network provided by Alcatel-Lucent. Alcatel-Lucent is currently involved in over 95 FTTH projects worldwide, over 80 of which are with GPON.

source:C114