networkZONE Products for the week of July 19, 2004

BroadLight Says…
BroadLight's BPON Controller For The Central Office Is Industry First
BroadLight Targets Today's Volume Fiber Deployments with Complete Hardware and Software Solutions for the CO and CPE

BroadLight, Inc. is now offering the XL230 -- the world's first broadband passive optical network (BPON) controller for the central office (CO). Featuring a new low-cost design, the XL230 controller is a complete hardware and software solution that will enable equipment vendors to quickly, easily and cost-effectively design high-speed broadband equipment for growing fiber deployments.

The availability of the XL230 is a major milestone in facilitating the rapid deployment of broadband over fiber. Equipment vendors who serve the large telecommunications service providers require solutions that operate at both ends of the fiber network -- from the central office all the way through to the customer premise equipment (CPE). Moreover, these original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) require a complete solution - the optical transceiver, the software stack and the controller. BroadLight is the first company to deliver the entire solution -- from end to end. As a result, the company is speeding the time it takes to cost-effectively roll out large-scale fiber deployments.

"The PON market is beginning to emerge as an inevitable broadband contender as service providers around the globe realize they can build profitable business and residential services around the technology," said Michael Howard, Principal Analyst and Co-Founder of Infonetics Research. "We believe this market will grow substantially over the next few years and BroadLight is well positioned as today, they are the only early supplier of BPON components and software for both the CO and CPE."

"The PON fiber market is being fueled by new, low-cost and standards compliant semiconductor and software technologies from companies such as BroadLight," said Steve Rago, Principal Analyst for Networking and Optical Communications with iSuppli (EL Segundo, CA) a leading communications research firm. "As costs continue to come down and products become standardized across the industry, this market should experience tremendous growth as a viable broadband alternative to cable and DSL."

"With the introduction of the XL230, BroadLight can provide customers with the significant cost savings and time-to-market requirements that they need to continue winning the volume fiber rollout contracts in the United States and abroad," said Andrew Vought, CEO of BroadLight. "In addition, since BroadLight is the only company that provides BPON solutions for both the CO and CPE, our customers can be assured of the most compatible, interoperable and standards-based components on the market."

About the XL230
BroadLight's XL230 is the only commercial BPON controller available today. The XL230 is based on BroadLight's leading XL230FP FPGA but also adds important new features and functionality including:

• Extended BPON (1.25 Gbps downstream and 622 Mbps upstream) for higher performance.
• Dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA) which enables higher upstream bandwidth utilization.
• Enhanced Utopia interface (Utopia 2 or 3 in a bus mode) for higher performance, cost and footprint reduction in a multi port CO BPON line card.

The XL230 also includes the following embedded functionalities: SERDES, BPON framing and media access, a TDMA controller, cell transmission, queue management, traffic security, privacy, and out-of-band management.

Complete Hardware and Software Platform
BroadLight provides a comprehensive BPON protocol stack and device driver to accompany its XL230 chip. By offering a complete solution, BroadLight is helping customers to bring superior products quickly to market.

These comprehensive sets of APIs provide customers with full control of the XL230 component, a variety of tests and diagnostics operations, performance monitoring, an in-band vendor-specific control channel, seamless integration with software through consolidated platform configuration files, and ANSI C-compliant software.

What is PON over Fiber?
PON is the architecture enabling service providers to roll out volumes of fiber-based broadband lines that are inexpensive to install and maintain, and provide unlimited bandwidth for today and in the future. PONs -- because they feature no active components -- allow carriers to offer higher bandwidth at lower operating costs, and with greater geographic reach than legacy DSL systems. In addition, PONs are future proof and allow service providers a guaranteed path toward future service offerings and higher margins. In the last year, the three big North American service providers -- Verizon, SBC and BellSouth -- issued RFPs for broadband PON and they plan, over the next few years, to service up to 13 million subscribers. PON technologies are also gaining popularity in Japan and announced plans include the deployment of 10 million FTTH connections by 2005.

PONs can be deployed as fiber to the premises, fiber to the home (FTTH), fiber to the building (FTTB) or fiber to the curb (FTTC), and offer a number of advantages over competing broadband technologies.

• Unlimited Performance - While cable typically loses bandwidth during peak user times, fiber provides required bandwidth all the time. In addition, PONs have longer reach than broadband services such as DSL and cable.
• Triple Play - Service providers can provide a better voice, video and data solution than cable providers because of unlimited bandwidth. This enables them to offer additional services and increase their revenue.
• Cost Savings - PONs require lower upfront network build costs for faster and more reliable rollouts, and less maintenance because there are no active electronics in the loop.

analogZONE Says . . .

PONs are hot these days, with everyone trying to get into the act, including recent announcements from Centillium, Freescale and Passavé (for EPON applications) rolling out their FTTP termination products. BroadLight has been in the business for as long as anyone (around four years) and has targeted the PON market with BPON/FTTP-based (ATM) products. They have had good success with their subscriber-side ONU and are now introducing what they claim to be the first CO-side BPON controller. The XL230 controller consists of a BroadLight-developed MAC chip, and an optical module that was built by a third-party operator to BroadLight Specs. The third element of the CO-side solution is a licensable software stack that drives the MAC/module combination, and supports the G.983 BPON protocol.

Together, they support up to 32 ONU ports, providing up to 622 Mbit/s of downstream (at 1490 nm) bandwidth and 155 Mbit/s upstream (at 1310 nm) over a 20 km fiber run. It also supports a third downstream channel at 1550 nm for analog (RF) video with over 1.4 GHz worth of bandwidth. This allows providers to compete with cable companies with cable-like analog video until digital video streaming to homes becomes practical. The BroadLight XL230 supports the "industry standard" bandwidth delivery format for BPONs, as well as an extended BPON spec which allows use of an upgraded transceiver to double capacity (up to 1244 Mbit/s downstream and 622 Mbit/s upstream).

The new MAC chip features an on-chip burst CDR and SERDES circuit that replaces the external CDR circuits used in the current transceiver module -- a feature that reduces the overall complexity and cost of the OLT (See Fig. 1). The BroadLight MAC also has on-chip patent-pending DBA (dynamic bandwidth allocation) circuitry to allow for better use of upstream bandwidth. It's a compatible superset of the industry standard DBA mechanism, but uses an improved management algorithm for higher efficiency. It supports both the SR (status report) polling mechanism that has each ONT node to report its status and the NSR (no status report) management mode) for making bandwidth allocation decisions. Just FYI, the NSR mechanism eliminates the reporting logic (and cost) at the CPE by detecting and counting upstream idle cells (or noting a lack thereof) from each port and using the information to adjust its next time slot allocations.

From what I could learn in my briefing, the fairness algorithm it employs should really be able to adjust quickly to changing conditions to prevent starvation and dynamically maintain QoS and minimize jitter (see Fig. 2). Part of the secret to the jitter management is in the on-chip FIFOs buffers that can absorb up to 1 k worth of ATM cells in each direction. Besides eliminating the need (ie cost) for external memory, the on-chip memory minimizes delays that could further degrade performance. Equipment designers and the folks that deploy it in the field will both appreciate the chip's multiple loop-back modes that allow exercise of both the chip and network elements.

As I mentioned earlier, the BPON controller comes with a licensable software package. For the basic one-time fee of around $100 k, you get a driver routine, a full-up MAC APON protocol stack, and the StratOSphere interface routine that provides a direct service call interface to your favorite RTOS (currently VxWorks, but others soon). You can license other software at an additional cost if you want to support DBA without writing it yourself, or the OMCI protocol, which is the management standard for SANs.

This controller is well-positioned to take advantage of the current popularity of ATM-based BPON technology favored by most North American carriers, who still run much of their traffic across ATM/SONET backbones. It may also achieve some popularity off-continent if BroadLight's assertions about China and Europe experimenting with BPON technology come to pass. The XL230 will also enjoy extra market traction thanks to a reference design developed jointly with Broadcom that pairs the controller with a BCM 6349 residential gateway and 3341 VoIP device (see Fig. 3)

While I think that some of the purported investment in, and roll-out of BPONs this year is a bit overblown, it is still a very promising technology. The equipment economics and OpEx of BPON (with our without optical RF video delivery) may enable telcos to finally compete with cable market's aggressive "triple play." Verizon, SBC and Bell South intend to service up to 13 million homes in the next few years, and Japan intends to have more than 10 million FTTP lines by 2005. So if we don't suffer another "bubble cycle" based on greed and irrational exuberance, PONS could significantly affect the economics of residential bandwidth in the next half-decade or so.

And BroadLight's efforts to cut the cost of CO-side equipment can only add to the momentum.

The XL230 BPON is sampling and will be priced at less than $50 in OEM volumes for the 622 Mbit/s downstream/155 Mbit/s upstream configuration and slightly more for the 1.25 Gbit/s downstream/622 Mbit/s upstream configuration.

Lee's Saltshaker Rating

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