A slew of equipment vendors are unveiling new Gigabit passive optical networking, or GPON, at NXTcomm this week, just as AT&T names its chosen GPON suppliers for deployment next year.

Just before the show, AT&T announced it would deploy GPON gear from Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson, which acquired start-up GPON vendor Entrisphere earlier this year.

At least four other vendors are unveiling new GPON gear at the show, including Alloptic, Calix, Wave7 Optics and Zhone Technologies.

Verizon began deploying GPON commercially this spring with plans to transition eventually to that technology from lower-speed broadband PON (BPON). AT&T said it would begin deploying GPON next year, but unlike Verizon, it will deploy only in greenfield applications.

Zhone is unveiling at NXTcomm the GPON gear it has been promising publicly since January. A new line card for the vendor’s MALC broadband loop carrier system delivers standards-based GPON to as many as 64 subscribers. Zhone hopes to differentiate its system with added Layer 3 intelligence in the customer-located optical network terminal (ONT). That product, the zNID, has remote monitoring and management capabilities based on TR-069, the DSL Forum standard widely used for DSL modems. That intelligence allows carriers to monitor everything from recent calls and channel changes to the zNID’s environmental conditions. And the device is powered over the existing phone lines in the home, freeing installers from having to route power lines to the ONT.

Calix also is making GPON news at the show. Its 2005 acquisition of Optical Solutions made it one of the leaders of the GPON sector, but at 1.2 Gb/s downstream, 622 Mb/s upstream, its brand of GPON was slower than the current generation offered by Alcatel-Lucent, Hitachi Telecom and others, which delivers nearly 2.5 Gb/s downstream and 1.2 Gb/s upstream. Moreover, Calix’s C7 multiservice access platform (which includes support for legacy services) offered only BPON, at 622 Mb/s downstream. Next month Calix will start shipping a new module for the C7 that delivers those higher speeds to up to 256 subscribers (or 5120 subscribers per C7). All of the 700 series ONTs that Calix’s customers already have deployed to customers’ homes will automatically detect and assimilate to the higher speeds when the new module is deployed, Calix said. That news should come as a relief to carriers such as Georgia’s Planters Rural Telephone Cooperative, which reluctantly deployed BPON over the C7 last year as other vendors offered GPON speed. Meanwhile, Calix’s F-series products, the ones it obtained from Optical Solutions, still deliver just 1.2 Gb/s downstream. “For the F series, the 2.4 Gb/s upgrade is a road map item,” said Geoff Burke, director of field marketing for Calix.