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The 3 R’s of EFM: Reach, Rate and Reliability

In today’s environment, any new investment requires significant justification and a near immediate return on that investment. As operators are facing rapidly increasing demand for broadband EFM services from business customers, as well as for backhauling both IP DSLAMs and cell towers, they need to figure out how to meet these demands while mitigating the risk. Although fiber could deliver these Ethernet services, only a limited number of locations that require fiber actually have access to it. Additionally, new fiber installs are occurring very slowly due to high construction costs and, therefore, are nearly impossible to justify, especially in these trying market conditions.

Operators are finding the business case for leveraging their existing copper networks to be highly attractive. The savings on infrastructure costs can be dramatic, often as much as 10 times cheaper than fiber with ROI as short as three to four months. But some are asking for information that proves copper will provide the required bandwidth over sufficient distances, with the reliability necessary to sustain the SLAs their retail and wholesale customers now insist on.

This is why at Actelis we refer to the “3 R’s of EFM: Rate, Reach and Reliability,” reflecting our absolute conviction that these are as fundamental to delivering broadband services over copper as the 3 R’s, Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, are to education. For EFM, the 3 R’s underpin the ability of copper to provide a fiber-like experience. Actelis has addressed each of the 3 R’s, in turn, with patented extensions to the standard EFM technology and bundled them in our EFMplus™ layer, thus separating Actelis from other EFM over copper companies.

The 3 R’s are essential to elevate copper to the level required by tomorrow’s broadband services. Many operators currently deliver T1 or E1-based services over copper, which at the rate of just 768 Kbps (1 Mbps for E1) per copper pair just do not scale up cost effectively to broadband EFM. Too many pairs would have to be recruited at too high a cost, even assuming that sufficient numbers were available. While standard EFM-based products are an improvement over T1/E1, Actelis has leapfrogged the industry with its EFMplus to deliver the utmost in copper performance and reliability with the promise of continually redefining the state of the art across all of the 3 R’s. This gives operators the assurance they need that our products will continue to match the ever-increasing levels of service their customers demand.

Key Markets
The world has adopted Ethernet for next-generation services, but some of the greatest opportunities like in backhaul and in the Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs), including education, health care and government sectors which require fast and affordable broadband access from large numbers of distributed sites. One of the largest drivers for carrier Ethernet over copper comes from mobile backhaul. Existing backhaul networks based on T1 and E1 circuits are running out of capacity and becoming prohibitively expensive. Additionally, mobile operators are under intense pressure to increase available bandwidth for emerging 4G services while maintaining competitive pricing. For this reason, all major mobile operators are planning to migrate their data and video backhaul to carrier Ethernet—and in most cases over copper. This represents an enormous opportunity for service providers, given that most cellular base stations are within reach of the copper infrastructure, especially with the help of Actelis’ unique EFMplus™ and EFM XR239 repeater technologies.

Actelis’ EFM 2BaseTL standard technology provides greater than a 10-fold speed increase per copper pair, when compared with legacy T1/E1 solutions.  While T1s are physically limited to a bit rate of 768 Kbps per copper pair, the new standard defines transceivers (or PHYs) supporting bit rates in excess of 10 Mbps per pair. All existing users of T1s and E1s can exploit these massive price/performance gains by migrating their networks to carrier Ethernet over copper solutions including many sites in education, health care, and among Small to Medium Businesses (SMBs), as well as many DSLAM cabinets.

Actelis Carrier Ethernet over Copper Solutions
Actelis offers a wide range of product configurations that support both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint configurations over one to 16 pairs of voice-grade copper. Actelis’ products fully comply with the IEEE 802.3ah Ethernet in the First Mile (EFM) and ITU-T G.998 standards, and are powered by Actelis' patented award-winning EFMplus™ technology that provides great Rate, Reach, and Reliability

Actelis Networks Technology
Actelis Networks patented bonded copper technology increases the achievable performance by implementing a “system-level” approach through an intricate system of hardware, software, and algorithms that interact with the modems and coordinates their behavior. Although the patented EFMplus™ technology is unique to Actelis, Actelis products are fully compliant with all applicable standards (IEEE, MEF, ITU-T, ANSI, ETSI, and others) with proven multi-vendor interoperability.