SANTA CLARA, CA — Electronics vendor Hitachi Communication Technologies America Inc. (HCTA) offers many flavors of PON equipment, including EPON, DePON (EPON hardware supporting DOCSIS software), MW-PON (wave-division multiplexing PON) and RFoG (fiber terminates at a DOCSIS cable node at the home). Now it has announced the availability of 10GEPON and 10G DePON optical network units and line cards – that is, customer-premises equipment and central office equipment – for its Salira product line.
Hitachi says these new offerings are capable of supporting the bandwidth needed for applications such as HDTV, 3DTV, videoconferencing, cloud computing, rich media files, gaming, transparent LAN services, MEF services and other business applications that are straining existing access technologies.
For cable operators, Hitachi’s 10 Gbps DePON offers a combination of high bandwidth, lower cost, and effective service control. HCTA’s work on integrating DOCSIS management with the IEEE GEPON physical layer paved the way for DOCSIS control of this new 10 Gbps infrastructure. Reusing DOCSIS management with 10 Gpbs fiber access is part of Hitachi’s strategy of leveraging existing standards-based equipment for an efficient migration from HFC to fiber access. The IEEE 802.3av standard supports symmetrical 10 Gbps transmission or 10 Gbps downstream and 1 Gbps upstream. The wavelengths used in 10GEPON are allocated with the goal of ensuring coexistence with existing GEPON and RF video to enable support for symmetric 10 Gbps ONUs, asymmetric 10 Gbps/1 Gbps ONUs, and symmetric 1 Gbps ONUs, as well as radio frequency (RF) video overlay on the same optical distribution network.
