I hope I said "E7"; it's what I meant to say. Yes, I wasn't going to stop at Calix; I'm just juggling budgetary type numbers at the moment; I'll have 3 or 4 quotes before I go to press. It's a 36 month project just to beginning of build, at this point, likely.
Assuming I get the gig at all.
The E7 is a good shelf, so that's a decent starting point. I'd also talk with Zhone, Allied Telesys, Adtran, and Cisco if for no other reason but get the best pricing you can. I'd also focus much more on your cost per port than the density since your uptake rate will be driven by economics long before port density and how much space your gear takes becomes an issue.
2) I have no idea who told you this, but this is completely and utterly incorrect in nationwide terms. If you have a specific layer 3 provder in mind that tells you they want a GPON hand off then that's fine, but ISPs in general don't know what GPON is and have no gear to terminate that kind of connection.
Other people here, said it. If nothing else, it's certainly what the largest nationwide FTTH provider is provisioning, and I suspect it serves more passings than anything else; possibly than everything else.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. The largest PON offering in the US is Verizon's FIOS, but AFAIK they don't interconnect with anyone at layer 2 and their layer 3 fiber connections are either Packet Over SONET, Gig E(most common), or very occasionally still ATM. I have heard of a few instances where they'd buy existing GPON networks but I've never heard of them cross connecting like this even with operators that they do significant business with in other ways.
But it doesn't matter either way, except in cross-connects between my MDF and my colo cages; except for GPONs apparent compatibility with RF CATV delivery (which I gather, but have not researched) is just block-upconvert, I don't care either way; there's no difference in the plant buildout.
This is not correct. DOCSIS is an MPEG stream over QAM or QPSK modulation and there is nothing about it that is compatible to any flavor of PON. In fact if you look at the various CableLabs standards you'll see DPoE ( http://www.cablelabs.com/dpoe/specifications/index.html) which lists how a DOCSIS system can inter-operate and provision an PON system. If you look at the two largest PON networks (FIOS and Uverse) you'll see the two different approaches to doing video with a PON architecture. Verizon is simply modulating a MPEG stream (this is block compatible to a cable plant, in fact its the same way that a HFC network functions) on a different color on the same fiber that they send their PON signalling. ATT takes another approach where they simply run IPTV over their PON network. I've listened to presentations from Verizon's VP of Engineering (at that time) for FIOS and he said their choice was driven by the technology available when they launched and they did modulated RF over their fiber instead of IPTV because that technology wasn't as mature when they started. Verizon's approach may be what someone was thinking of when they said that PON was compatible to cable signaling but that's not how it works.
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