Many service providers see value in locating ONTs inside the living unit. For many years, Calix has offered a specially designed mounting bracket and splice tray for structured wiring enclosures. This was ideal for greenfield applications where structured wiring enclosures are most commonly found, but was not an ideal solution for existing housing units.
The 716GE-I is the first Calix ONT designed to address a wider range of indoor settings. Its modern, consumer product-inspired design enables it to be located in public settings, such as desktops and visible wall locations. The 716GE-I offers two POTS and four GE ports and all the most valued features of Calix 700GE ONTs:
- Support for both GPON and Active Ethernet (AE) through the unique Calix auto-detect technology
- Full symmetrical, line rate GE
- Every port separately provisioned
- Support for multiple services (VLANs) over each GE port
- Remote ONT activation (RONTA) via a voice response system
- Voice services – both TDM and VOIP (SIP and H.248)
The 716GE-I is the first indoor ONT in the industry that supports both GPON and AE in the same home unit. This is an extremely important feature for service providers when considering indoor ONTs, since any future technology change would require the service provider to gain access to the inside of the home versus facilitated access when an ONT is located outside. With this auto-detect feature, a service provider changing its service offering in the future from GPON to AE would require no dispatches or truck rolls – a significant OPEX savings. To perform a technology switch, a fiber is merely moved to the appropriate OLT in the serving office and the ONT retrains to the new technology within seconds. Additionally, by having full symmetrical GE, the subscriber units are ready for whatever bandwidth requirements emerge in coming years.
Counter-intuitively, another important feature when considering indoor ONTs is temperature range. The 716GE-I offers a wide temperature (-5 up to 50 degrees C) specification for a wide range of indoor installations. This is important in providing greater flexibility to service providers in where to locate ONTs. Indoor does not always mean environmentally controlled – indoor ONTs will often be located in garages or in rooms that may not be well ventilated. By expanding the number of locations, Calix lowers the cost of deployment.
The 716GE-I has two powering options, a standard UPS with battery back-up and an AC/DC wall transformer for applications where battery back-up is not required.
