We report the fabrication of widely tunable ridge waveguide distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) lasers with InGaAsP butt-joint as grating material. The shape of the butt–joint interface is found to have significant effect on the properties of the lasers. It is shown that irregular mode jumps during wavelength tuning can be avoided by a V-shaped butt–joint interface. From the fabricated device, 23 channels with 0.8 nm spacing and greater than 35 dB side mode suppression ratios are obtained. The different tuning characteristics of the ridge waveguide and the previously reported buried ridge stripe DBR lasers are discussed. Combined with the wide tuning range and the simple structure, the ridge waveguide DBR lasers are promising for use in wavelength division multiplexing passive optical networks (WDM-PONs).