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A new five-year forecast by Dell’Oro Group predicts increased sales of GPON optical line terminals (OLTs), DOCSIS 3.0 CMTS and VDSL infrastructure equipment through 2016. Driven by growing bandwidth requirements, the report say that GPON will show the fastest growth, followed by CMTS and VDSL, offsetting a trend of declining revenue for slower-speed ADSL equipment.

“Our forecast for GPON growth is driven by deployment in China as well as increasing projects in other global regions,” says Steve Nozik, principal analyst of access research at Dell’Oro Group. “For CMTS, growth will be driven by rapidly increasing Internet traffic, competition with telecom service providers, and an increasing focus on the small and medium-sized business market among cable operators as well as a migration to IP video service.”

The report also expects DOCSIS to continue as the primary cable broadband technology for at least the next five years due to additional channel bonding being used to meet increasing bandwidth needs. VDSL growth will be driven by its higher bandwidth capabilities in association with emerging vectoring technology aimed at extending the life of copper infrastructures by eliminating crosstalk.

After the 2011 collaboration on the first 100-Gbps link in Eastern Europe (see "ETT, Ciena deploy first commercial 100G network in Eastern Europe"), Ukrainian telecommunication operator Eurotranstelecom (ETT) and Ciena announced the nationwide rollout of Ciena’s 100-Gbps coherent optical technology in ETT’s backbone network. With this deployment, ETT extends its original 100-Gbps network connecting Kiev and Kharkov to cover all major Ukrainian regional centers, including Lvov, Donetsk, Odessa, and Dnepropetrovsk. It also provides high-speed support for traffic from European, Ukrainian and Russian operators.

“As 100-Gbps adoption gathers momentum globally, large demand-driven deployments such as this one are also testament to the bandwidth explosion that the Russia/CIS region is going through at the moment,” says Sergei Fishkin, Ciena’s regional managing director for Russia, CIS and the Baltics. “With the growing adoption of high-bandwidth applications such as cloud computing, high-capacity networks are becoming more instrumental than ever before in allowing operators to meet the requirements of their customers.”

With the rollout, ETT can operate 10-, 40-, and 100-Gbps channels simultaneously while providing a seamless upgrade to higher capacities as bandwidth requirements on its network change in the future.

ETT operates its own underground fiber-optic cable network along railways, covering all major regions in Ukraine. The operator has its own national DWDM, SDH, and IP/MPLS networks, offering IP transit, data and voice transmission, lambda services, collocation, dark fiber renting, and maintenance services to clients.

China Mobile Shangdong Branch (Shangdong Mobile) deploy Huawei’s GPON fiber-to-wireless (FTTW) offering in 17 cities of Shandong province to backhaul wireless local area network (WLAN) data streams and help Shangdong Mobile provide 54-Mbps Internet access for 50,000 WLAN hotspots in schools, offices, transport hubs, hotels, leisure places, downtown areas, and residences.

The FTTW equipment will be deployed in Shangdong Mobile’s E2E mobile backhaul network, covering the optical line terminal (OLT) in the central office, the optical distribution network (ODN), and the optical access equipment for multi-dwelling units (MDUs).

The combination of WLAN and existing mobile communication networks provides high-speed mobile broadband access, says Huawei. This enables users to work away from their offices, browse websites, send and receive emails, watch online movies, and download large files on the fly.

Communications service provider XO Communications has begun rolling out 100-Gbps wavelengths on a U.S. nationwide fiber-optic backbone network using coherent-based technology from Nokia Siemens Networks. XO chose Nokia Siemens Networks’ technology over that of its other incumbent long-distance platform supplier, Infinera.

According to XO Senior Vice President and CTO Randy Niklas, the first-of-its-kind national network initially will see four to six wavelengths of 100-Gbps traffic traveling over previously unlit fiber. The routes will have the capacity to handle 96 wavelengths, either with newly installed Nokia Siemens Networks hiT7300 systems or, in the near-term future, upgrades to the hiT7300 platforms XO already had in its network.

The 100-Gbps wavelengths will derive from multiplexed 10-Gbps traffic, Niklas told Lightwave. However, conversations are already underway with wholesale and client service customers who might require 100-Gbps connections. Along these lines, XO has completed 100-Gbps interface certification on Cisco routers and is doing the same with Juniper Networks routers, Niklas added.

Niklas said that XO did not conduct an RFP for the backbone project, but turned to its incumbent suppliers. He said Nokia Siemens Networks was chosen because it could deliver 100-Gbps capabilities to XO’s amortization targets better than Infinera. “And we frankly got good business terms,” he added.

XO has partially completed the roll out, with work ongoing in its West Coast, Northeast corridor, and southwest territories. Meanwhile, the company has already turned its attention to shorter reach applications, thanks to interest from a major wireless carrier customer that wants 100-Gbps connectivity to its switching centers. To meet such requirements, XO also is certifying platforms from Ciena and Cisco for 100-Gbps performance.

This is the first announced 100-Gbps customer in North America, Jim Benson, head of Optical Networks for the Americas at Nokia Siemens Networks, confirmed. However, he indicated that XO isn’t the company’s only customer on the continent. Nokia Siemens Networks announced a pair of European 100G customers previously.