A couple weeks ago, Ethernity attended the FTTH Conference 2023 in Madrid, Spain as a guest of a potential XGS-PON customer. The conference, which is hosted by the FTTH Council Europe, is the world’s largest fiber optic trade fair, featuring expert workshops on a wide range of fiber-enabled technologies and regulatory subjects, as well as an expo of service providers, manufacturers, and vendors.
From Ethernity’s perspective, the conference was very successful, with positive meetings with at least four potential customers, including one especially large system integrator who seemed very keen on Ethernity’s technology. Possible deals were discussed, and plans were set in motion for various tests and proofs of concept to be arranged over the following weeks and months.
One of the most positive outcomes of the conference were a series of reports that emerge from the FTTH Council, illustrating how much fiber has penetrated the European market. As discussed in an article in Lightwave magazine, the reports paint a picture of a market in which fiber-to-the-home and fiber-to-the-building are growing at a steep rate. Perhaps even better, there seems to be much room for further expansion as the technology continues to develop and as subscribers are evangelized and converted.
In fact, pretty much all forecasts for the PON industry are extremely positive and optimistic of late. A recent article in LightReading pointed out that both industry insiders and analysts are seeing operators focus much of their efforts on fiber, especially on XGS-PON. Fiber is seen as a cost-saving architecture, and many service providers are coming around to the idea that it has applications beyond residential to be of value for commercial and industrial implementations as well.
Ethernity sees these trends as excellent news for its burgeoning PON business, whether it’s our new UEP3808 OLT appliance, our XGS-PON FPGA SoC, or our FTTR PON device. We look forward to contributing heavily to the growing number of fiber deployments and the advancement of the market from PON to GPON to XGS-PON and onward into 25G and even 50G PON in the coming years.
