The incumbents, who tend to favour GPON, say they won't consider a widespread roll out fibre until their customers start to demand services that can't be run over existing broadband technologies like ADSL.
One exception to this trend is Lattelecom, the incumbent carrier in Latvia, which has just announced a deal to buy GPON equipment from ECI Telecom (see Lattelecom selects ECI Telecom's GPON solution). The amount of the deal was not disclosed.
Latvia is a small country of some 900,000 households and a total population of 2.3 million. The roll out has already started in the capital city of Riga, where approximately 50,000 households will be connected in the first stage of the project.
Lattelecom is really aiming to put its country on the map by offering chart topping access speeds of 100 Mbit/s initally, and 500 Mbit/s by the end of the year — which would be among the fastest in Europe. This can be achieved by dividing the PON between fewer subscribers, says Ron Levin, ECI's associate vice-president of product marketing.
GPON equipment offers 2.5 Gbit/s of download capacity in total; when shared by the maximum 128 subscribers, each receives 20 Mbit/s. Speeds of 500 Mbit/s could be achieved by sharing the PON between only four subscribers, a more expensive option that would probably be targeted at businesses rather than consumers, he says.
ECI is adding to a growing list of customers for its GPON equipment, which include Fibra Networks in Norway and Tutor, a carrier's carrier in France that has been rolling out FTTH in three cities for the past year. ECI also claims to have two more as-yet unnamed customers, one in Latin America and the other in the former Soviet Union.
As Lattelecom is an incumbent operator in Latvia, ECI classes it as a tier 1. The vendor is also "in the very final stage with another tier 1 project," according to Levin.