Even as his company begins deployment of its second generation of fiber-to-the-premises technology in Gigabit passive optical networks, or GPON, Verizon Chief Technology Officer Mark Wegleitner is looking ahead to what’s next, including WDM PONs, ultrawideband networking in the home and next-generation 3-D television.

The key for Verizon, Wegleitner said at a media dinner Monday night, is that all of this will be deliverable over the fiber network the company is deploying today.

“We aren’t going to change what we put in the ground or hang onto poles,” he said. Even when the company delivers a wavelength to each home on the network, Wegleitner said, “I’m still comfortable with the stuff in the ground today.”

WDM PON—standards for which should be developed by 2010—would use a wavelength to every home. That acknowledges the continual demand for bandwidth, including greater emphasis on upstream bandwidth for user-generated content, Wegleitner said, as well as more sophisticated videoconferencing capabilities all the way up to telepresence, something now coming into the business community.

However, Wegleitner wouldn’t commit to when, or even whether, his company will move from its current hybrid approach to deliver video, using traditional cable TV for the broadcast channels and IPTV for video-on-demand and interactive applications.