Wednesday, November 28, 2007

City Telecom to Deploy Alcatel GPON

City Telecom in Hong will start deploying Alcatel GPON systems as part of its FTTH network starting in January 2008 to support its Hong Kong Broadband Network service. City Telecom has a firm plan to extend its fiber coverage from 1.4 million homes passed today to 2 million by 2010. This will give it 90 percent population coverage in Hong Kong.

City Telecom will use both active Ethernet and GPON in its future deployments. It has found that the cost performance of GPON has improved to the point where it is competitive with Ethernet in certain deployment scenarios, particularly in lower density applications. It has also found that GPON can overcome the 100 meter distance limitation of 100 BaseT Ethernet over Category 5 cable.

This is an interesting move. City Telecom has been using Cisco point-to-point Ethernet until now. It indicates that GPON does provide real benefits over active Ethernet in some applications but has not yet won the technology battle.

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