Press Release:
Telcordia Hosts FSAN's Fifth GPON Interoperability Event
PISCATAWAY, NJ - November 8, 2007 - As an industry leader in Gigabit Passive Optical Networking (GPON) interoperability requirements and testing, Telcordia (www.telcordia.com) recently hosted the fifth Full Service Access Network (FSAN) interoperability test event at its U.S. headquarters. This is the latest example of Telcordia's two decades of leadership and experience providing testing services for state-of-the-art technologies, which have included FTTx optical systems and components, and SONET/SDH network elements to support commercial services.
The event is organized by Telcordia in cooperation with FSAN (an affiliation of international network operators and telecom vendors), Corning Cable Systems and Shenick Network Systems. The 3-day event allowed vendors to verify their understanding of the relevant industry specifications and to validate implementations early in the development process; thereby avoiding costly changes later in a GPON product's commercial life. In all, 15 system and device vendors participated, interconnecting GPON products and reference designs at Telcordia to test interoperability.
"We are very pleased with the success of this test event, which was due in part to the excellent preparation by Telcordia and all the participating GPON system and device vendors, and the maturity of the GPON technology demonstrated at this event," said Regis Coat (France Telecom) and Paolo Solina (Telecom Italia), co-chairs of FSAN Interoperability Task Group. "FSAN is currently working to identify and mitigate OMCI-related service provisioning interoperability issues between different manufacturers' GPON implementations. The progress made at the Piscataway test event was an excellent step toward our goal of full OMCI interoperability across a wide range of GPON implementations."
"Through this Telcordia-hosted GPON test event, we continue our commitment to facilitating the FSAN operator and vendor community's goal of providing a rich marketplace of interoperable GPON solutions in an environment that helps minimize the risks investment for the operator community," said Rudi Schubert, director, Telcordia Network Product Integrity. "The strong GPON device, customer premises and system vendor participation in this test event indicates the strong industry commitment to interoperable GPON solutions."
The ITU G.984 GPON standard enables line rates of 2.5 Gbps in the downstream direction (central office to customer) and 1.2 Gbps in the upstream direction (customer to central office).
The event involved 15 GPON equipment and integrated circuit device vendors including Adtran, Alcatel-Lucent, BroadLight, Cambridge Industries Group, Comtrend, Conexant, Ericsson, Freescale, Huawei, Ikanos Communications, Nokia Siemens Networks, Occam Networks, PMC-Sierra, TXP Corp., and ZTE.
The main goal of this test event was to demonstrate the interoperability of GPON equipment at the service layer in a full OMCI (ONT Management & Control Interface) context. Detailed test cases were carried out to verify the provisioning of a number of Ethernet flow handling scenarios in a multi-vendor environment.
The test infrastructure used at this event included the Shenick diversifEye™ triple-play service test platform and optical distribution network (ODN) fiber and the outside plant distribution elements of Corning Cable Systems Evolant® Solutions for Access Networks. Future GPON test events will expand the number of service models and address quality of service (QoS) performance.
About FSAN
The Full Service Access Network (FSAN) Group is an interest group for the world's leading telecommunications services providers, independent test labs, and equipment suppliers to work towards a common goal of truly broadband fiber access networks.
For more information: http://www.fsanweb.org/
Contact:
Sharon Oddy
Telcordia Technologies, Inc.
(732) 699-4203
oddys@telcordia.com