ZTE today unveiled its Gigabit passive optical network solution as well as announced its first U.S. customer for the platform, communications systems integrator L&W Technologies.

Jess Lee, ZTE associate vice president in charge of GPON, said that although ZTE is entering the North American fiber-to-the-premises market late, the Chinese vendor is offering one of the most bandwidth-efficient and flexible GPON platforms in the market, benefiting from the extra years of intensive R&D in China.

The scale of GPON deployments is still quite small, Lee said. “In the U.S., many operators have already made [vendor] announcements, but coverage is still very limited,” Lee said. “We think there is plenty of opportunity left.”

Lee added that ZTE is placing a high degree of functionality into the individual network elements so they can be deployed together as a vertically integrated platform or deployed individually with other vendors’ gear. ZTE has gone through extensive operability testing with seven other vendors, including arch rival Huawei, to ensure its premises-side optical network terminal (ONT) and its network-side optical line terminal (OLT) will interoperate fully as part of a multivendor environment.

The GPON platform will round out L&W’s access portfolio. Lee said L&W selected ZTE specifically for the functionality in its OLT, but he envisioned other customers with networks already rolled out may opt to purchase its ONT units. The platform, called the ZXA10, will support IPTV and next-generation video-on-demand.