Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Immenstar in Ethernet PON Market

LightReading today has an interesting article about Immenstar, a startup, joining the EPON market. Immenstar has been operating in stealth mode for over two years. LightReading also mentions that Immenstar claims to have a multimillion dollar order due next month, possibly from UTStarComm which sells equipment to Softbank BB Corp for the deployment of Yahoo Broadband Service in Japan. UTStarComm previously used Passave (acquired by PMC-Sierra) chipsets but that didnt work very well as many of Passave chips had errors. The news article is available here.

The product portfolio of Immenstar is very interesting, it offers a Quad OLT chip with integrates 4 OLT ports and 4 Gigabit Ethernet ports with Non Blocking Switching. The company website mentions that the MuLan EPON Switch Chipset provides a carrier-class Ethernet ultrabroadband access solutions for network operators and service providers. It offers quality of service, fault tolerant operating system, hot swap capability, scalability, and high density system for the EPON access network.

It is interesting to see a startup in the EPON area, as there are already a bunch of companies competing for limited marketplace. EPON seems to be growing primarily in Japan and Korea while North America seems to be moving towards the GFP-PON market. And although different EPON chipset vendors promise to deliver quality of service, technologically there doesn't seem to be anything different that Immenstar has to offer compared to existing chipsets in the marketplace.

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