BroadLight Announces 25 Design Wins, Next-Gen Technology

By Jessica Davis -- Electronic News, 5/22/2006

Marking the progress of fiber networks to the home, BroadLight today announced 25 design wins for its end-to-end GPON (gigabit passive optical network) products that enable such networks, and also announced a next generation GPON product targeted at the high-performance multi-tenant market.

The company’s new design wins are mostly in North America with clusters in Korea and China and others in Europe, Latin America and Japan, said CEO Andrew Vought, who estimates that his company has captured about 50 percent of the market because of its 3Q lead on its competitors.

“We’re expecting that 2007 is the year when these design wins start to be deployed in significant quantities,” said Vought.  “Our strategy is that we are first with a GPON solution so we’ve been getting all the wins. There are others out there but they have only slideware so far.”  OEMs wanting to jump into market don’t have a lot of alternatives.”

BroadLight had its first engineering samples in customer hands in December 2005, and the company is now sampling its next generation chip targeted at the multi-tenant unit market.

Other technologies targeted at the passive optical network market have included BPON (broadband passive optical network) which has been a common choice in the North American market, and EPON (Ethernet passive optical network), more common in markets such as China.  But Vought said those customers are moving to GPON now because they are realizing that it offers advantages over the other systems without costing any more.