ftth,
Most of the big-name PON players that both you and Curtis mentioned (as cited in your post and in the Light Reading article that CB posted) were a part of the original Full Service Area Network (FSAN) Bellcore/ITU consortium back in the mid-Ninties. About three years ago (and several times since then) I've posted those documents here in LMT, but I'll be damned if the search engine here allows me to find them now. I snipped them from a Telephony Magazine archive and some Bellcore and ITU urls that were found therein. If I'm not mistaken some of those articles and docs were also from several international multimedia telecom associations.
Now here's the irony. FSAN/PON was first conceptualized at about the same time that the cable camp, under the stewardship of CableLabs, was first conjuring up their DOCSIS blueprint. Now here we are (or at least here I am, and maybe you and a few others), five or six years later, talking about the probable limitations of DOCSIS in the face of new Internet requirements. At the same time PON hasn't even deployed yet, to speak of.
Now PON's backbone and distribution architectures are made up mostly of SONET and ATM, respectively, where it is ready for deployment in some areas. So, we have DOCSIS already deployed, and PON directly behind it now poised to make a grand entrance. And now, suddenly, we see a rebirth of interest in the old standby protocol, Ethernet, only this time up to a thousand times faster than its first incarnation. GbE and 10GbE sit quietly in the wings ready to explode.
The question that I raise is this: Is PON, as it is presently defined in the FSAN blueprints (which is the same architecture, + or - a negligible amount, that the big names are now slated to support), headed for obsolescence even before it ever gets to deploy?
If the promoters of the Gb/10GbE model have their way, and there is now every indication that they stand a more than equal chance at having their way in many parts of the world (starting with Canada, Sweden and Holland), then the answer is, IMO, yes. I'll further posit that the US of A will be in a reactive mode to these advancements abroad, just as in the case of many wireless initiatives in cellular and pcs, and now wireless broadband Internet access, because of the momentum and single-/narrow-mindedness of the powers that be in both the cable and telephony sectors. It's for this reason that I think that it'll be up to the power companies, and the fledgling ventures they sponsor, to make it otherwise.
One more thing. Despite all of the foregoing, it's a safe bet that there will be billions spent on PON, just the same. It's the American Way.
Comments and corrections welcome.
FAC |
