China Unicom has deployed 180,000 GPON lines in its Shanxi FTTx project.
For its part, China Mobile, which now has fixed-network licenses, has chosen GPON for several hundred thousand FTTx trial ports. It has primarily used GPON because of its limited central office and optical cable resources.
Wei Leping, director of China Telecom's Science & Technologies Committee, expects GPON to become the dominant technology in 2013.
"GPON still lags behind EPON in terms of installed base, standardization and the maturity of the industrial chain. However, GPON will eventually replace EPON as the dominant technology. GPON provides higher data rates, better performance, the support for multiple services and carrier-class management," Wei said at an industry event in Beijing last month.
He expects that GPON will be put into massive use in 2010 and supersede EPON in terms of market share in 2012. In 2013 the GPON market will be three times that of the EPON market, he predicted.
Alcatel-Lucent is a keen advocate of GPON technology. The company claims that GPON can satisfy the demand from users for the next five to ten years, whereas demand will outstrip EPON's capacity in the near future.
ZTE, which has introduced a prototype of the world's first symmetrical 10G EPON equipment, is pushing for EPON.
"To provide 16 to 20 Mbps of bandwidth, EPON is the most mature and inexpensive technology available. The telecom operators can later smoothly upgrade to 10G EPON without having to rebuild networks when they want to provide 50 to 100 Mbps of bandwidth," Xu Ming, ZTE's vice president and fixed-line product general manager, told an industry conference.
Xu noted that GPON equipment provided by different vendors is not interoperable.
Chen Lidong, an official from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's telecom development department, said at the same conference that FTTH's development in China still faces many challenges, such as high costs, lack of killer applications and the lack of legislation for wiring in buildings.
Chen said faster FTTH development needed government support because telecom operators were already invested heavily on their 3G rollouts. He believes that video applications such as IPTV will drive the growth of broadband and called for removal of policies that obstruct the convergence of voice, data and video services.
China had just 2.36 million IPTV subscribers at the end of 2008, according to statistics from CCID Consulting. The IPTV market is growing slowly because some local broadcasting authorities still resist IPTV in fear of competition against digital cable TV services.
There is also dispute over whether telecom operators or real estate developers should pay for the local wiring in buildings. Chen holds the view that real estate developers should be responsible for deploying local wiring and called for legislation from the government.