Carrier Ethernet began as a metro and backbone network technology but is now reaching out to provide access to small enterprises in remote sites, creating a great opportunity for carriers to win new business and boost revenues at a time when legacy packet-based services are stagnating. It is time for carriers to seize the opportunity to deploy Carrier Ethernet to both new and existing customers to power next generation network applications and services throughout the extended enterprise. The technology now exists for them to do this over their existing copper infrastructure, with the help of new repeater technology to reach more remote sites.

The benefits of Carrier Ethernet are well known. They can be summed up in three words: cost, capacity and flexibility. Carrier Ethernet dramatically cuts the cost of bandwidth by exploiting commodity technologies and products. It brings far greater performance than legacy technologies such as ATM and frame relay, again through investment made by the whole data networking industry. Above all, Ethernet is creating opportunities for carriers to maximize revenues by offering flexible services of different classes, with the ability to scale them in small and lucrative increments.

This is great news for carriers, because they already have the infrastructure in the ground with their copper networks to bring Carrier Ethernet to nearly all business and cell sites. Only 13% of US business premises currently have access to fiber, and this figure is growing very slowly, at most by 2% per year, according to research by industry analysts Vertical Systems. It does not take a market analyst to tell you that fiber is not going to deliver universal access anytime soon. Copper, however, is available almost everywhere.

The technology is now available to deliver carrier Ethernet over copper and exploit multiple bonded pairs to scale up to 45 Mbps. The combination of Ethernet’s inherent scalability with the ability to recruit extra copper pairs, up to 8 or even 16 in total, gives carriers a highly flexible platform for delivering incremental services to smaller enterprises, branch offices, cellular towers, and DSLAM sites. Indeed, almost any remote site beyond the reach of fiber can have access to carrier Ethernet services over copper.

The greatest demand for Carrier Ethernet from remote sites lies in the 10 Mbps to 20 Mbps range, which is the sweet spot for these “mid-band” Ethernet services. The technology to deliver this is now available from Silicon Valley-based Actelis Networks, allowing carriers to reach nearly all their potential customers with no digging and no plant upgrade.

Demand for such services will come from the industrial and public sectors, including enterprises big and small, and also for backhauling wireless and DSL networks. Few carriers have the marketing muscle to tackle all these areas simultaneously and will naturally want to take the low hanging fruit first. Fortunately, more than half the fruit is low hanging, lying within just four sectors: hospitals, schools, cell site backhaul, and remote DSLAM backhaul.

A recent study, again by Vertical Systems, found that education and healthcare between them account for more than 50% of the Ethernet ports shipped in the vertical markets. Similarly, cell sites account for over half the market for backhaul Ethernet at present, but also with significant opportunities to hook DSLAMs in central offices or street cabinets to core fiber networks. There is also scope for Ethernet over copper in a number of campus settings, along with large multi-tenanted commercial buildings for onward distribution from fiber backhaul networks.

For now, most carriers should concentrate their resources on the big markets: schools, hospitals and remote cell or DSLAM sites, where Actelis is well placed to help develop the optimum service. Most of these sites are currently served by low speed and expensive legacy services, very often based on T1s or even dial up in the case of some schools and remote medical facilities. These T1s may have been state of the art a decade ago, but now are much too expensive and inefficient for today’s high-speed data services. In fact, T1 requires two copper pairs to deliver 1.5Mbps, which means a full 25 pair bundle still falls short of two 10 Mbps Ethernet connections. The award-winning Actelis EFM (Ethernet in the First Mile) over copper solution, called EFMplus™, increases the bandwidth capacity of copper six times, which means that just four pairs are needed for those two 10 Mbps Ethernet connections. With many school and medical sites having just fractional T1 circuits at present, running at 56 Kbps, it is not surprising that bandwidth has become a bottleneck there. Such sites are crying out for an upgrade, which carriers can now readily provide.

In the case of cell site backhaul, there is an equally pressing need for more bandwidth, driven by the advent of 3G and even 4G mobile services with increasing amounts of real time video. The same is true for many carriers offering broadband DSL services off remote DSLAMs, where again growth in multimedia services is pressurizing backhaul bandwidth. Many of these mobile and DSL services currently run on legacy T1 circuits, consuming too many copper pairs and holding back on multimedia services. However, if mobile operators and DSL providers can migrate their data services from T1s to EFM, they can increase their data capacity by six times. There will then be no danger of running out of copper.

But many of these sites, including cell towers, DSLAM cabinets and branch offices, are a long way from the nearest fiber access point. Carriers will want to know whether EFM over copper will reach these remote customers with sufficient bandwidth, given the well-known distance limitations of the DSL technologies, such as VDSL, at higher speeds.

Fortunately, the latest repeater technology from Actelis does provide this reach. This is important because the bit rate delivered by EFM over copper starts to decrease at distances over 3000 feet, with serious degradation after 5000 feet. Actelis, however, has extended the range 10 fold to 50,000 feet by developing a multi-pair electrical repeater, which regenerates the signal using just the power on the line. The launch of this repeater in July 2006 was hailed as a major breakthrough for Ethernet over copper by leading analysts and industry watchers. It has already persuaded a number of carriers to adopt EFM, in the knowledge that they can now offer the service to almost all business sites and cell towers in the US.

Repeaters have been around for years in enterprise Ethernet, with the technology deployed in switches to regenerate the signal to each segment or user. But to work over the larger distances within the external copper plant, Actelis had to solve new problems to minimize the impact of interference and line noise, and is widely recognized as the best in the business on these fronts.

This leads to another important point, which is that copper cannot be treated like a commodity to the extent that fiber can. The varying quality of its installation and conditions of its operation requite highly sophisticated and intelligent signal processing. Then copper can approach the low bit error rates of fiber and, therefore, match its reliability and QOS. Actelis Networks’ EFMplus technology is able to adapt to line noise in real time, maintaining spectral compatibility between different services operating across multiple pairs. The story here is, Actelis Networks has beaten its rivals in exploiting the power of modern silicon to adapt in real time for varying signal noise and spectral conditions across multiple lines and, therefore, has been able to optimize the performance of the whole copper plant and not just individual pairs. This means that Actelis solutions, unlike those from rival vendors, do really deliver the performance actually promised.