Nokia Siemens Gives Up on GPON

Nokia Siemens announced that it will limit its investment in GPON because it does not expect mass market rollout of FTTH in the short term. Instead, Nokia Siemens will focus on ADSL-2+ and VDSL along with the development of next generation PON technology.

These next generation technologies include DWDM PON that can significantly expand the capacity of each fiber along with Hybrid PON that can extend the range of PON loops and facilitate the deployment of non-blocking IPTV aggregation/access networks.

DWDM PON will be enable the deployment of much higher speed PON services to each home and business. This will enable PON to meet future bandwidth requirements and extend PON into a broad set of business and enterprise applications.

Hybrid PON will permit the OLTs to be collocated in IPTV regional video headends, for example and create a network of dedicated connections to each subscriber. This will provide non-blocking access to each subscriber for unicast, on demand content. A 100 percent unicast service, such as this, will be required to support network PVR and interactive advertising applications.

This is a risky bet. If Nokia Siemens can beat it its competition to these new PON technology, it should be a winning bet. On the other hand, it will be hard for the company to maintain a strong focus on PON when it is not actively participating in the market.