May 22, 2006 Mountain View, CA -- BroadLight Inc. announced that it has secured 25 design wins for its End-to-End (E2E) GPON product line and introduced the BL2340 GPON ONT chip. The latter announcement enables Broadlight to offer a device tailored for multiple dwelling unit (MDU) and multi-tenant unit (MTU) applications; the former bespeaks of how well the company has taken advantage of beating its competition to market.
"Twenty-five GPON design wins in such a short time is a clear indicator that GPON is a hot market and that BroadLight is clearly one of the leading silicon suppliers," offers Jeff Heynen, directing analyst of broadband and IPTV for Infonetics Research, in a BroadLight press release. "We believe the company's ability to have one of the first working silicon and software solutions in time for the recent GPON RFP in North America is a key reason for this early traction."
Dan Parsons, BroadLight's director of marketing, agrees that the ability to meet the tri-RBOC RFP deadlines helped the company win business with systems houses in North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. Another important ingredient for success is the fact that BroadLight's competition -- which includes such companies as AMCC, Conexant, Freescale, and PMC-Sierra/Passave -- has yet, in most if not all cases, to make working silicon available to the market for both the OLT and ONT in the quantities necessary to meet customer demand. BroadLight first unveiled its E2E GPON line in June 2005 and delivered samples in December 2005. Parsons says that the majority of competition BroadLight has faced has come from internal design teams at systems houses, who had begun work on their own approaches while waiting for the merchant silicon vendors to come up with viable alternatives.
AMCC, Conexant, and Passave (before its acquisition by PMC-Sierra) have trumpeted their intentions to enter the GPON market, but have not yet announced delivery of finished products. Freescale has teamed with Alcatel for a GPON chipset that Freescale sources have said will be made available to the open market as well as to Alcatel. Parsons reports that he has not seen evidence of the Freescale chip in the hands of systems houses.
Parsons is extremely bullish on GPON's prospects for market penetration. In addition to the success the RBOC RFP augers, Parsons points to deployments and/or RFPs in South America, EMEA, and Asia (including China and India) as signs that the technology is catching on worldwide.
BroadLight's initial E2E GPON line included the BL2000 GPON System-on-Chip (SoC) for ONU/ONT applications; the BL3000 GPON OLT MAC; and PONmaker software for ONU and OLT platforms. The software Parsons equates with SIP in the voice-over-IP world; he claims all of BroadLight's GPON customers have purchased the software. This family has now expanded to include the BL2340 GPON ONT chip for MDU/MTU applications. Now sampling, the BL2340 is designed to support high-bandwidth services to multiple users via a single ONT. It features a separate control plane and data plane with its embedded "Runner" PON processor. The BL2340 can bridge full duplex wirespeed Gigabit Ethernet services onto GPON and control the services based on class of service (CoS) levels, the company says. The chip will support circuit emulation services, Parsons adds.
-- S. Hardy