Rostelecom arranged the largest tender in Russia for the purchase of subscriber equipment GPON

Rostelecom is organizing a tender for the purchase of just over 1.54 million GPON-based devices. GPON technology involves the laying of an optical cable in each apartment. The operator needs GPON routers and GPON sockets. The starting price of lots for the purchase is $ 91.94 million and $ 24 million, respectively. This is the largest tender of Rostelecom for the purchase of subscriber equipment GPON - for the first time it is held centrally for all macroregional branches of the operator, said a representative of Rostelecom Valery Kosterev. The initial price of a GPON router is $ 82.8, a GPON socket is $ 54.81, but Rostelecom expects to significantly reduce it by purchasing a larger batch, Kosterev notes.

Source: Telecom Daily

In early September 2015, during the last federal tender for the purchase of 2.22 million FTTB modems, the starting price was reduced by 45%, he recalls. The Fiber to the building technology involves the installation of fiber optics to the house and the distribution of the Internet to the apartments via copper cables.
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According to Kostarev, GPON routers Rostelecom plans to use mainly for new connections and in part to reconnect subscribers using xDSL (broadband Internet access via telephone wires). Of the 28 million households covered by Rostelecom fiber optic networks, about a third can be connected to GPON.

According to Telecom Daily, by the beginning of the third quarter of 2015, GPON used about 1.5 million of approximately 10.5 million Rostelecom broadband users. Over the year, Rostelecom connected just over 0.5 million GPON subscribers, calculated Telecom Daily CEO Denis Kuskov. It can be assumed that 1.5 million routers will last for about 1.5 years, since the company is actively building passive fiber-optic networks and also converts xDSL subscribers to optics, he argues.
According to the operator, the number of private users of Rostelecom broadband in the second quarter of 2015 increased by 4% compared to the same period last year.

According to Telecom Daily, Rostelecom serves approximately 65% ​​of Russian GPON users. Almost everyone else is MGTS. According to Tatyana Martyanova, MGTS representative, 3.7 million Moscow apartments could use the GPON-network of MGTS for 2011–2015, and 1.3 million of them use at least one of the services. More than 700 thousand subscribers use two or more services, reports Martianova.

Connecting one apartment in GPON without subscriber equipment costs an average of $ 150, which is about 2 times more expensive than, for example, FTTx, said Alkhas Mirzabekov, general director of Iskratelekom . For the construction and repair of GPON-lines, more qualified specialists are required than for FTTx, he explains. Connecting a subscriber on a traditional copper pair pays off in about a year, for GPON this period is twice as long. At the same time, ARPU and a set of additional services used by subscribers do not differ much: perhaps, those who are promoting GPON rely on additional revenue from new additional services in the future, but so far there is no difference. There are technological limitations when using GPON: there the channel has to be divided into all, which is why the speed can fall, and the subscriber’s FTTx line can be connected at guaranteed speeds up to 1 Gbit / s, Mirzabekov argues.

FTTB also uses Transtelecom , its representative Tatyana Semenova told Vedomosti. This technology allows us to provide services similar in quality to GPON, but at a lower cost of connection. GPON is much more expensive due to the high cost of subscriber equipment, the cost of which the operator has to assume, adds Semenova.