Webinar
Webinar: How OpenPON Helps Service Providers Cut Costs, Stay Flexible, and Avoid Vendor Lock-In
Webinar Transcript
Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity. Filler words have been removed for easier readability. Scroll over text to continue reading.
00:00 Introduction
Sarah: All right, welcome everyone. Um, Roger, do you want to go ahead and get us kicked off?
Roger: Yes, thank you, everyone, for your time. I really appreciate you joining us today.
I’m Roger Perlson, I’m Director of Business Development here at CSSA.
As most of you have come to know, CSSA is a member-driven, partner-powered, and future-focused association and through that, as we work with service providers and our membership on a day-to-day basis, and through our member forums. There are certain hurdles that each of you have come across through your deployments. And so what we do is we work with our partners to find solutions for that, to empower you to get over those hurdles, and complete the deployments within the schedules and the technologies that you need.
But it’s not just providing a solution for today. Is it scalable? Will it adapt to your needs, to your customers’ needs? I mean, it has to be very… future… not proofed, but forward-looking in the solutions and we’ve done that today, I believe, with two of our partners, with Comtrend and Harmonic. OpenPON, I think, really solves a lot of the issues that we’re facing today.
And I’m going to let AJ take it from there. Aj?
01:22 Why OpenPON matters
AJ: Alright, thanks, Roger. Um, yeah, we’re pretty excited about this, you know, obviously this is something that Comtrend’s been talking about for about 2 years. Roger was one of our earliest adopters of this. In fact, our largest customer we have jointly with CSSA, already has over 3,200 ONTs deployed and a number of others besides that.
We actually just put out a case study on one of our newest customers, Terra Nova, and how this solution reduced their fiber costs by about 70%. So, Roger knows me well, many of you know me. I can be kind of the doom and gloom guy, I’m always the one, because I handle our distributor relationships and make sure that hardware gets to the ISPs. I’m constantly looking at what the challenges are and what threats there are in the market.
You know, this technology, the greatest thing about it is the fact that it is an open solution. And on the next slide, you’ll see just some of those bullet points, which is, um, you know, being that it is an open solution. You’re not locked into a single vendor, so it gives the ISP the control of the different parts of the system, so that you as an ISP can choose, you know, I like this vendor because they have the lowest cost, this vendor maybe has certain settings or features that I need, or, you know, very important, what we’ve seen over the past few years. This vendor has inventory.
In the DSL world, in the cable world, where, you know, many of us have come from, or have experience over the past decades you know, everything was standards-based. DSL, you had your DSLAM, so you could have whatever DSLAM, whatever CPE. Cable World CMTS, same type of thing with DOCSIS. You know, somehow in this fiber world, in PON specifically, it came out initially with this closed end-to-end, closed single vendor.
And I can tell you what I saw when the pandemic hit really hard was getting calls from a number of service providers, a number of distributors, saying that, you know, for lack of a $40 ONT, which was in a locked ecosystem from one of those legacy providers, service providers were stuck not being able to deploy fiber right at the exact moment when everyone was going home and signing up for, you know, broadband service or increasing their broadband service at their house because they needed to work from home during the pandemic.
Now, that was, of course, you know, hopefully a once-in-a-century thing. But you know, there’s a lot of things, and I think we have a tendency to forget some of the multiple things that affect our business, because we get through them, and then we go back to doing business as usual, something else comes up, another challenge, business as usual.
So the next slide just shows a few of the many things that, you know, we’ve seen in the past.
You know, one big one that I’m very aware of, because I handle our distributor relationships, are the ports. So, over the last 10 years, we’ve had 3 major port strikes. 40% of the goods come through here, Long Beach Los Angeles, and it’s important to, from a service provider aspect. If there is a port strike, if the West Coast ports are blocked, if the East Coast ports are blocked, to have the ability to choose another, piece of the puzzle, so that you can continue to deploy products. So, you know, those are things that are going to continue to happen. Especially as more and more automation comes online at the port complexes and the port workers kind of fight back against that. You know, that’s a big thing to be aware of.
Another one, so that’s, the last 10 years, we’ve had 3 port strikes. We’ve had one pandemic, 3 port strikes. We’ve had component issues. You know, we’re hearing a lot about the iPhone today and Apple. And how there’s 1,600 different components that go into a single iPhone. All of our products are like that. You know, we don’t necessarily have, on an ONT, 1600 pieces that go into production of that device, but there’s a lot of different components that come from different factories in different regions.
They all need to get shipped to a single area, get there at the same time, so that those products can come off of the factory floor. And then ship to where they’re needed. If I can bring you back to something that maybe we’ve all forgotten with the chaos that has gone over the past few years. Was the MLCC capacitor issue.
So, MLCC, back in 2017, before pandemic, before tariffs, that was a little capacitor that’s in every electronic piece of equipment. The price on that component spiked. To give you an example, or, well, to tell you why, it’s because we are all buying more things that have more of these components in it, from Ring cameras to cars. You know, in 2000, a car had about 1,000 MLCCs in it. Today, it’s not uncommon for a car to have 20,000 MLCCs in it.
And in 2000, none of us had Ring cameras. We didn’t have Alexas. We didn’t have all these things that we have today. So, the price on that single component spiked. The automotive industry, which is willing to pay a lot more for MLCCs than, say, consumer electronics, started pulling up all those MLCCs. What we all saw was increase in price, decrease in supply, and lead times that spiked to 52 weeks.
Again, we may not remember this because so much has happened over the past few years, but as you know, this globalized society, a lot more pressure gets on that. These are the kind of things that we might see more and more. Again, very important as a service provider to be able to pivot from one vendor to another vendor, because this vendor has supply. This vendor has a product that I need, and this OpenPON solution allows you to do that.
Other things to consider, you know, man-made natural disasters, um, whether it’s an earthquake, tsunami, you know, hopefully we never see China, Taiwan heat up, but those kind of things can affect supply. If your vendor is manufacturing in an area that’s affected by a large earthquake, tsunami, hits a port complex, or something like that, you’re going to need the ability to pivot.
Also, other things we’ve seen recently, the U.S. Government becoming more of an activist government. So, we have the tariffs that we’re all very, very aware of. We have other things like the Routers Act, which has passed the U.S. House of Representatives and is currently under consideration with the Senate that’s banning specific companies that have ties to, the Chinese government. So we’ve already seen Huawei and ZTE you know, sidelined. They have their eyes on TP-Link right now, we’ll see how that plays out.
But the point being, as the government is pushing certain initiatives, like you know, we want to make sure manufacturers are sourcing components from this location, or manufacturing in this area, or do not have ties to this government. You don’t want to be in a scenario where the company that you work with, the company that your whole deployments depend upon, are on the wrong side of the ledger.
And, I mean, as we’ve seen today, it’s even companies like Apple. That they’re targeting. So it’s, you know, not necessarily just these,Chinese companies, that are being targeted. It is whatever the initiative is that the U.S. Government is trying to push. So that’s why companies like Comtrend, other companies have the built in America, so we’ve moved some of our ONTs to be built in America, if that’s something that a service provider needs.
And then the last thing I’ll touch on before I pass it over to Hy is the DZS Zone Chapter 7. So, we saw that, um, almost no notification. Dzs went Chapter 7, that’s not a Chapter 11 reorg. That’s complete liquidation. Now, since then, they are trying to reconstitute under the zone name. But in the interim, for the last 3 or 4 months, they’ve lost a lot of talent, and they’ve lost a lot of credibility. So, as a service provider, that, amongst all these other things, should be a wake-up call, that you know, depending on a single vendor for all of my deployments can put a lot of my business at risk.
So, you know, we are very, very excited to be in this open architecture solution. Comtrend has always pushed the best-of-breed open architecture, whether it’s from our ACS to products like this. We see this as the future, we see this as the best way for our customer base, which is really, kind of tier, you know, 2 and below. Rural ISPs to make sure to secure their business. So,
that’s kind of my spiel. Again, my doom and gloom, you know, the big goal is to keep things running and keep things working as as well as possible for the service provider.
And with that, you know, the big thing is now going to be about the technology which Hy is gonna talk about.
10:45 Harmonic Introduction
Hy: Anthony, we’re all here for you. You don’t have to suffer alone, alright? Pick up the phone, call a friend. Thanks for that, uh, everybody. My name is Hy Huynh, It’s pronounced H-Y, but I promise you it’s spelled H-Y, but it’s pronounced “he”, like the pronoun. And, my role here with Harmonic is, VP of Fiber Products, and I’m in charge of our fiber business strategy and our fiber product strategy. So, thanks for joining us today and giving us this opportunity to speak with you.
I’m gonna start off by sharing a little bit about who we are in case you’re not familiar with Harmonic, we can give you a little overview on that. But then, want to focus on how this open ecosystem can, we believe, truly benefit, you as the operator and ultimately your customers as well. And next, we’ll show you a little bit more about the type of products that we have within our portfolio that can help enable that. So let’s jump into it.
So this is harmonic at a glance. We have both a broadband as well as a video business unit.
That are effectively kind of focused on those respective areas. Obviously, I’m within the broadband business unit. Our 2024 revenues were about $670 million, and our market capitalization is a little over a billion dollars. We’re headquartered in Silicon Valley, in San Jose, California, let’s be specific.
We are known for, being a leader in innovating the cloud-native solutions for our platforms. And, we have market-leading customers that are all around the world. It’ll show you some, you know, quick racing stripes On the left are just, you know, a cross-section of some of our customers that we work with at least the ones that are happy to have us show their logo.
We have about 235,000 managed remote devices. These are called edge devices, supporting about 33 million CPE today, and We’ve been proud of having our technology be recognized, so that’s an Emmy Award silhouette, because we have actually won Emmy Awards, so I didn’t just pluck a random, award-looking picture and put it on here. So that’s… that’s harmonic in a quick glance.
13:21 The OpenPON Approach
Next, I’m gonna go into a bit of, uh, if you indulge me, infomercial mode for a moment. But, uh, I promise it won’t be long. When we think about OpenPON and open ONT world, along with the things that Harmonic believes is, you know, better and best for you and operating our customers. We think about in these terms, right, when we sum it up. We think we can allow you to accelerate your PON networks, and ultimately accelerate your revenues. We focused on helping you minimize the total cost of ownership. Maximize your operational flexibility and then ultimately accelerate your time to revenue.
Today we’ll talk a little bit more into each of these areas, but we endeavor to help you reduce your capex, right? So you can spend less to buy it up front, and then also less to deploy because of the flexibility. We want to help you reduce your OPEX as well. It should be products that are less for you to operate, and cost you less to maintain, which ultimately results in, you know, the more that you buy, the more that you get to save.
And by buy, I mean buying into this open philosophy. We help you maximize your operational flexibility. You know, you’ll see how we support any kind of technology to give you a greater diversity of your tool belt. We have support for any form factor, so that you can almost surgically select the best solution for the use case you’re addressing. We’ll support any CPE, so we give you vendor freedom, so you can buy from folks like Comtrend. And for all the reasons that Anthony discussed earlier.
And our products are meant to be future-ready, so that it can evolve with you. With all this type of flexibility, it allows you to unlock your network from a closed bookended ecosystem. Which also ultimately allows you to unlock your operations, too.
And finally, we’ll talk about how we can accelerate your time to revenue. Because these tools and this openness allows you to deploy faster, it’ll allow you to reach, more and new customers because you may be able to capture segment, so you otherwise can’t justify doing today. It’ll keep your customers happier. And if needed, you know, our companies can give you turnkey professional services, too, with our efforts together. Which culminates to, guess what? The more you buy. The more you make. That’s my infomercial. Call now, and shipping handling is waived. Just kidding. I’m sure there’s a charge for that.
16:05 Open Architecture, What’s Possible?
Okay, let’s jump into it. So, this is a high-level diagram of how harmonic approaches our architecture. This top layer here with a cloud, this represents our… what we call our COS platform. It runs native, cloud native, it runs on, you know, off-the-shelf servers for it to be hosted. It takes care of all the management, the provisioning, the monitoring, analytics, etc.
All of that’s within that platform. We support any technology, and by any technology, I mean, at the same time, once you install that platform, we support PON Technologies and DOCSIS all at the same time. When it comes to PON, you see that we will support, uh, GPON, 10G EPON, XGS PON, 25GS PON, and, you know, any kind of future PONs as they come down the pipe we’ll be a part of.
But, you know, we’re agnostic to the vendor. You can have vendor A, B, C, D, E, and whatever it is that you need, you have the opportunity to pick the best of breed and what you can have access to. And finally, we also support, uh, you know, with the DOCSIS solution, too. If you have any use cases where that’s relevant.
17:23 The Cost of Vendor Lock-In
Let’s dig in, double-click a little bit more about the open ONT approach and what that means.
These are numbers, um, meaning pricing. That is not, you know, from me, but from a leading global consulting analyst firm tha tracks all this data. And a caveat, this excludes, data from China, because when you include Chinese data, it just, it washes away a lot of the statistics for the rest of the world. So this is world minus China.
The average selling price, the global ASP for a 10-gig PON port is roughly around $800 a port. Again, global, so this includes lower ARPU parts of the world as well, but… For this, 800 bucks.
When you look at the average selling price for ONTs from folks like, uh, Calix, Adtran, DZS, Nokia. These bookended solutions, these vendor-locked solutions. Again, the data says it is about $200 as a global ASP.
So, let’s pretend you have one PON port, and you use a 32-PON split. That’s 32 ONTs for every PON port. So you’re spending $3,200 to $6,400 on your CPE. Providing that range there.
Now, versus, if you went with the Open ONT philosophy with harmonic and Comtrend as a CPE vendor. The data on the global OSP says it’s about $100 a pop. I think that’s actually probably being generous in terms of how much it is. I think the trend is that you can probably quite easily get a bridge-only XGS-PON ONT, for well under $100 a pop now, but I want it to be true to pulling the data direct from its source.
When you do the math, what this really means is that for every two, you save $2 to $4 for every buck that you spend with an open ONT approach. Simply on the ONT piece of it alone.
You could also have a cap and growth strategy, right? Because that, in my case, I’m willing to integrate with your existing brownfield ONTs that are already deployed. Well, those can remain untouched and you continue to support those using a cap and grow strategy.
Ultimately, we go back to the theme of… the original theme of the more you buy, the more you save. This is a key part of why Open ONT is fantastic for you. Not to mention all of the other aspects that Anthony mentioned.
So, look, we will allow you to bring your own ONT, like I said, avoid CPE vendor lock. Get competitive pricing, quickly adopt new technologies, because you get to just pick best-of-breed and not be limited to only the options that are provided to you by one vendor.
Harmonic’s approach to this is we have interop facilities throughout the world that includes here in Silicon Valley and several other R&D locations around the world. We have some racing stripes here to give you examples of ONT vendors that we have worked with.
In the cases of the vendor locked solutions, oftentimes we are… making it work, right? Regardless of their willingness to help or not. And we also don’t care about the silicon. It could be Broadcom, Cortina, MaxLinear, Airoha whatever it may be, is all good with us. Now, let’s talk about some of the Comtrend ONT lineup that’s available to you. Anthony, uh… Toss it to you.
21:28 Comtrend’s Lineup
AJ: So this is our current lineup, as well as roadmap. We have our legacy ONTs there on the right, 4283, 4286, which we’re still selling, 2.5 and 10 gig, and with voice ports on the 2.5.
these ones on the left here, these ones are kind of our next-gen units, and these are the ones that also we can do Build in America.
So, obviously there’s a price difference there, but if that is something that’s important to you as a service provider, come to us and we can talk about, lead times and, pricing and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, number of these units on the shelf today, 4283, 4286, 4361. And, and the SFP version, the 4606. And then, those last two on the right, that GRG-4355, that’s an all-in-one device with Wi-Fi 7 built in, and then the 4366 outdoor with VoIP. Go ahead, Hy.
22:27 Reliability & Flexibility
Hy: Fantastic. Well, so, look, it… It’s great that we can support, um, the ONTs of choice.
Um, and be, you know, open and flexible. But recognize that, all of that may not matter unless you have reliability. And for us, reliability at Harmonic is something that we track meticulously, and we consistently have five nines.
Reliability uptime globally across all of our deployments. So Q1 through Q4 of last year. This is the overall average. So for every issue involved, where you’re still five nines and then if we subtract out the non-harmonic, uh, faulting issues Um, we’re still 5-9s, but slightly better. So, point 9996 versus point 9992.
How do we keep track of this information? It’s because that with our platform. We have a bunch of analytics that you have access to, so we get to very easily calculate this information regularly. Again, because we have all of that data readily available through our platform for monitoring management. The formula for calculating uptime is stupid easy. We have this many customers, devices deployed.
How many minutes uptime was there possible? How many minutes uptime was there actually? Divide them out, and you get a percentage. So we have consistently, perform that 5-9 plus reliability, including, when the issue is not related to us when people are running our platform.
24:18 Form Factors
Okay, talked about flexibility. In terms of, uh, you know, any form factor and deployments.
Well, we have form factors for our products that can be deployed in head-ins, on shelves, outdoor cabinets as well as outdoor enclosures.
For hubs and cabinets, we have a shelf-based solutions that can go up to 48 10G PONs and a 1RU space, so very high density. We have node form factors that are fully enclosed, and you just deploy them on strands, poles, in some cases walls or even cabinets, too. Our large nodes can support up to 16 10G PONs in one node.
Our compact nodes can support up to 8 10G PONs in one node. And so you can see here we have industry-leading densities on the high density end but we also have, uniquely, at the same time, surgical level of density with our SFP Plus pluggable OLT.
So you can surgically choose to just plug in one PON port at a time. Where it makes sense. This eliminates the need to be committed to a large Chassis or a large shelf no matter what, right? You have flexibility to surgically select what’s best for your use case.
25:40 Deployment Scenarios & Use Cases
Now, let’s go over some of the deployments scenarios that we can support with this portfolio.
Because our platform naturally supports both PON and DOCSIS, you have the option, if it matters, within, in this case, starting with a node to support both DOCSIS and PON at the same time.
And in this case, this would be a use case where you’re adding one of our PON modules that support 8 PON Ports. I’m using the highest split, you know, 128 in my assumption, but that can support up to 1,500 subs, anywhere from 20,000 to 60,000 meters away.
Now, what if you wanted to do more? Sure. This here I’m showing that you can do a couple of things. One, you’re gonna note that just all all fiber, so 16 PON ports can support, you know, up to 2,000 subs.
But, if you have a node strategy at all, you know, particularly in rural areas where it may not be cost-effective to pool permits, build cabinets, or build a hub site. This could be ideal for you,
but you can daisy chain. So, if you have a node out here in one location, you can actually Daisy-chain it, because our modules have built-in switches, and you can daisy-chain it down up to 80 kilometers if you use, you know, long-range optics. And hang another node right off of that.
And off you go. You don’t have to rebuild all that mid-mile infrastructure.
Now, what if you want to take a shelf approach? Sure. I’m showing, a switch that’s, you know, sold by Harmonic Wharf, but it could… it’s called the Wharf, but it could be pretty much any switch with SFP pluses that you have out there for the most part.
If you have existing switches out there. Like a topper rack switch, for example, and you want to add some more PON ports to it. You can add as little as one port at a time with our Fin Pluggable Micro OLT.
Now, in this use case, I have a device that has a switch that has 24 10 25 gig ports, so you can have up to 24 PON ports if you want, which supports up to 3,000 subs.
But, okay, what if you know that this location… let me get a little more dense, and you want to have more PON ports? We have a product called Pier, and the Pier is right down here. You can put that in that location. I’m showing a cabinet, but this very well can just be in your CO, and in your head end, whatever location that you want. But it’s environmentally hardened, that’s why it can be in an outdoor cabinet.
But this gives you 32 PON ports in just this shelf in one RU. And you add it up with the 24 up there, you can support up to 6,000 subs in just 2 RUs of space. Earlier, I mentioned you can daisy-chain a node off of a node. Well, you can daisy-chain a node off of this cabinet solution as well.
Again, if you’re trying to reach out to more rural areas, this may be faster time to market and more cost-effective for you to get deployed. But you can daisy chain a node, and in this case, I’m showing you a compact node. Right? Again, presumably because you’re going somewhere that is, uh, lower density.
And that can support up to 1,000 subs or 8 PON ports. Let me show you here. We had to work with a customer that wanted to have, in a cabinet that was pole mountable. You know, and battery backups and all. Right? We gave them a solution working, in this case, with Clearfield. And one of the advantages was they needed the extended battery backup time without having to spend a lot of money on very large batteries.
Our products have industry-leading power and space. In many cases, half the power utilization of the traditional OLTs are out there. And we were putting this cabinet. Let me play a little video.
This is literally in one of our lab spaces when I filmed this, but if you take a look.
So it was a relatively smaller cabinet once you have perspective with the hand, and in there, there’s some fiber splitters, DC power rectifiers. Our pier, OLT, and a switch, our wharf switch in there. And they all kind of fit nicely into this small cabinet. We’re hanging off of it. Our Oyster Compact Node.If you want to do that, and there you go. Again, this is an example of something that’s fully… it’s lightweight enough and small enough that can be fully mounted up on a pole.
Now, this is maybe something more of what is typical, high density deployments. So, how do we do that? No problem. I’m showing an example where here, in 7RUs of space, we have 6 of our pier OLTs, and then we have a aggregation switch on top. This will support 192 10-gig PONs. And up to 24,000 subs in 7RUs of space.
What does that look like inside of a potential cabinet? A heck of a lot like this. So, all of that with space to spare, in case you want to expand, with time.
31:05 Power & Space Savings
I have been talking about industry leading for power and space, so, what does that actually look like in some numbers? Okay, well, here you go. I’m including the top of rack switch in my calculations when I say 7RUs, but what’s pictured right here, 119 PON ports, 24,000 subs averages out to 27 PON ports for each RU. And the total watts is 1,160 watts That works out to about 6 watts per PON port.
Again, how does this compare to a lot of what’s out there in the traditionally deployed OLT solutions. This is roughly half, or in some cases, less than half of the amount of power that we have to use. Okay. Now, I’ve talked about 10 gig PON. Now. This obviously isn’t limited to 10G PON, you can support GPON if you want on the same platform, you can support Combo PON, too, if that what you want.
But what about the very… you know, what comes beyond 10 gig? I will simply, for this conversation, because we’re not really having a future technologies conversation, we’ll share that well, we’re bringing 25GS PON support to our portfolio this year as well. So, we talked about the pluggable that does 10 gig. We’re gonna come out with a Fin 2.
That’s a pluggable that does 25GB. And if you have uh, you know, switches that are 10 25 GB ready to go. Then you can selectively choose to plug in a 25GS PON versus 10 gig PON.
As you need. Jetty-2 is the name of our hardened remote switch module that goes into nodes.
It is a 1025 gig switch. So, similarly, you can choose to put in 10 gig PON ports, or 25GB PON ports.
This is for our pluggable-based technology. You can selectively only put in, you know, one or two 25-gig PON ports, because presumably, not all of your customers kind of need
that super high speed.
So, what do you do? Well, to simplify the operation so you don’t have to have unique drops, or multiple drops at every location. You can coexist them with a coexistence element,
which combines the 25 gig across one or more of the 10 gig PON ports Once you get to the home, or the premise. You get to choose if you’re giving them 10 gig speeds or 25 gig speeds, based on the ONT that you install and plug into.
So, it keeps the operations simple, and it gives you a graceful, seamless uh, migration strategy.
And with that, I say thank you to those that are attending.
33:52 Q&A
Sarah: Thanks! And then, um, we did receive a number of questions throughout, so let’s go ahead and address some of those. The first was asking:
How would you go about upgrading from existing PON architecture? For example, GPON, XGSPON, 25, uh, 50, without interrupting existing traffic?
Hy: That’s a good question. So there’s several approaches to it. I’ll start with GPON to XGS PON. One approach that people have taken is they upgrade the PON port, the OLT PON port from, say, just a GPON to a combo PON port The moment you upgrade to a combo PON port with a combo PON optic.
Then that exact same drop to the end user’s home will carry both GPON and XGS PON
At that point, you get to take a graceful cap and grow strategy. Customers who have GPON ONTs continue to be happy, hunky-dory. New customers that want XGS-PON, you give them an XGS PON ONT. That GPON customer, if for whatever reason they want to upgrade– Churn prevention, higher speeds, etc.– you just swap out the ONT from a GPON ONT to a XGS PON ONT, And off you go. That is the migration strategy that you can take if you use a combo PON optic.
Another version of that strategy is to keep your GPON OLT where it may be.
And next to it, you add a XGS PON OLT. So now you have dedicated GPON and XGS PON ports. And you use what’s called a coexistence element. That… that you can, you know. Add to it, and this coexistent element effectively has built-in bin film filters, and it will mux together. Your GPON and XGS PON ports down into a single fiber down your ODN and down the drops to your customer, and you can do the exact same strategy of When you provide what ONT for what technology, and is a graceful migration.
So, those are examples of going from GPON to XGS PON. Everything I just said would also apply if you were to go to a next-gen technology, like 25GS PON .Right. You can have coexistence, single drop to a customer. Graceful cap and grow strategy, as needed, based on the ONT that you can pull out there.
Sarah: Nice, thank you. Let’s see… there’s also a question, um, how difficult is it to transition a current closed system to potentially one of these OpenPON systems.
Hy: That’s a great question, right. So there’s a reason why Harmonic has several ONT Interop labs and research facilities scattered across the world. For devices that, you know, we have a list, right, that we’ve done before. Off you go. If you happen to deploy those devices that we’ve already previously certified interopted. Very easy, because it’s already done.
For devices that are new to us, usually there’s kind of two ways about it. For what we like to term the friendlies, Comtrend would be a friendly, by the way, then we work hand-in-hand with the ONT provider, and the interop goes pretty smoothly.
So that just takes a little bit of time, but we know how to do it, and we’re working hand-in-hand.
We get it interopted. And we consistently, you know, work to qualify it, support it, test it on an ongoing basis.
The tougher part, uh, is usually the… In my terms, the unfriendly vendors, the ones that actively have a vested interest in keeping ecosystems closed, regardless of how much depending on who they are, publicly, they talk about being involved in, you know, boards and forums and desire to be open.
It just doesn’t… it’s not true for what their bottom line is driven on. In those cases, it’s harder. And the way that we do that is we actually will,so to speak, reverse engineer it, right? We’ll do PON analyzers, and we’ll see the traffic, and we’ll reverse engineer it and make it work with our OLTs. That takes a little bit longer of time. But it’s just a matter of time, but it gets done.
Once that part is done, the transition for you is actually relatively easy. You can choose to completely forklift the vendor-Locked OLT and put in Harmonic’s OLT. And then, reconnect all the fibers. In that case, all of your existing brownfield ONTs will continue to work, because we’ve integrated with it, and you can do a cap and grow strategy with, say, Comtrends ONTs for all your new installs, and any kind of upgrades and churn that you would like.
The alternative will be to, again, that side-by-side strategy of keeping your OLT, and then putting a harmonic OLT, and you do a coexistence down to that customer.
Typically, with most of our customers, they usually have a reason to upgrade and start moving away from the legacy vendor locked solution that they have, and they simply put in our our OLT, and we do interop for them, and they take a cap and growth strategy.
Sarah: Great, thank you. The next question is asking, how the harmonic OLT compares to the TiBit solution.
Hy: Oh, great question. So full disclosure, Harmonic’s OLTs are, we work with multiple PON silicon vendors. You saw a number of examples where we’re showing the pluggable.
That is from TiBit, which is now Ciena. So we purchased the plugs from Ciena. Formally TiBit. But we strip out all of the software, and we use it literally just as silicon. And we put on all of the harmonic software management on top of that. So, the hardware is the same, but we have greater flexibility. And everything is managed through the award-winning COS core platform. We also have Broadcom based solutions like our pier shelf that had the 32 ports.
We have certain node modules that are also Broadcom based, right? So those are completely unrelated to anything from Ciena or TiBit. But would give you that vendor diversity by having multiple silicon vendors, and therefore multiple platform options available to you.
Sarah: Nice. And then it looks like we’re coming up on time, so let’s do one more. Somebody asked, do you believe combo XGS2550 ports will be applicable moving forward?
Hy: Do I believe combo 25 and 50 port speed moving forward? Is that the question?
Sarah: Yeah.
Hy: So, yes, I do think that they will be applicable. And… There was a question earlier about, you know, how do you migrate in the coexistence?I think that it’s just inevitable, because it wouldn’t be… I wouldn’t expect, as you introduce these higher Speed Technologies that you would have 25, 50, and not meant… it wasn’t asking the question, but I’ll throw in 100 gig. I think 100GB is… for another webinar, probably where things are gonna end up instead.
You’re not gonna have those to every single home for a long, long time, right? So it doesn’t make sense to upgrade every single port to that very high speed. So, being able to coexist and have this quote-on-quote combo approach, I think will be quintessential.
Sarah: Great. Um, it does look like somebody asked if we’ll be sharing the presentation,
so just so you guys know, we’ll send out an email to everybody, um, with the recording, so you can refer back to this, and also include our contact information if you guys are interested in learning more.
With that, we’ll wrap up the Q&A. Um, Roger, did you want to close us out?
42:43 Closing Remarks
Roger: Again, I just want to emphasize how much we appreciate your time.
This is very valuable, and that you would spend it with us to discuss these technologies.
It’s not lost, and we appreciate that. Thank you to our friends at Harmonic and Comtrend.
For sharing this with us. Reach out, but we’ll be following up as well. If you have any additional questions. You should have our contact information. If not, I will be touching you personally.
But again, thank you. I just want to thank everybody for attending.
About The Webinar
Frustrated by being confined to a single vendor’s system? You’re not alone. More service providers are choosing OpenPON to regain control of their fiber deployments. With OpenPON, you benefit from reduced costs, enhanced scalability, flexibility, access to cutting-edge technologies, and improved downtime mitigation during emergencies or shortages. Join Comtrend, CSSA, and Harmonic for a real-world discussion on how OpenPON is reshaping the way fiber networks are built. This open approach is breaking long-standing barriers between OLT and ONT suppliers—giving service providers more choice, more control, and a clearer path to scale. Whether you’re planning a new deployment or reevaluating your current strategy, this session will offer practical insights into how OpenPON can help you reduce complexity, improve adaptability, and make decisions based on what works best for your network.
Speakers
Sarah Tomasi | Comtrend
Moderator
AJ Saccacio | Comtrend
Host
Roger Perlsen | CSSA
Host
Hy Huynh | Harmonic
Presenter
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