Growth in bandwidth demand today is being fueled by new customers, new applications, and increasing mobility. Everyone is using mobile data now, both on mobile and WiFi networks. Residential customers have begun consuming multiple streams of HD video. And small and medium businesses are rapidly becoming consumers of both high speed IP/Ethernet and Cloud services. Intelligent traffic system, industrial, environmental and security sensors and HD surveillance cameras are being deployed almost everywhere throughout the metro.
The network is bringing unprecedented value to subscribers, resulting in greater bandwidth utilization everywhere. But that growth in network utilization has required getting more bandwidth to more places, and offering services at a far lower revenue per bit than ever before. Which creates a problem: the fiber network is not designed to do this cost effectively, and wireless technologies can meet only a fraction of the need while introducing greater operational complexity.
Fiber networks are best for delivering high bandwidth to areas with a high concentration of users, such as major buildings, city centers, office parks, or macro cell sites. Fiber is not optimal for aggregating moderate amounts of bandwidth from many locations. FTTH is extremely expensive, and FTTC still involves the expense of pushing many smaller and less efficient DSLAMs closer to customers and having to backhaul traffic from so many locations. Likewise, wireless microwave is not optimized for getting bandwidth to many buildings scattered throughout the metro, or to small cell locations that are down at street level. Another solution is required.
Copper cable, a widely available and fully amortized asset, offers the quickest and most cost effective way to provide connectivity to many places throughout the metro. But historically it was limited to n x T1/E1 bandwidth scalability and to native DSL transmission rates, and it is subject to some performance variability due to EMI, crosstalk, and transients.
Actelis Networks has overcome the limitation of copper by developing best in class Ethernet First Mile (EFM) over Copper transmission and broadband amplification technology. This standards-based innovation overcomes the challenges of EMI, crosstalk, and transients to make copper a highly reliable, high performance transmission media that scales Ethernet services into the 100s of Mbps and beyond, and enables serving far more residential subscribers with high speed broadband access and triple play services.
Actelis’ high performance broadband over copper more quickly and cost effectively reaches the many buildings occupied by small and medium businesses, and the WiFi hotspots, small cell base stations, HD cameras and sensors where copper meets and exceeds bandwidth and performance requirements and where the cost and complexity of fiber or microwave are simply not justified. Only by using copper wherever possible can service operators truly maximize profitability for high growth applications and services offered to price sensitive customers.
For residential broadband, leveraging existing DSL assets makes tremendous sense – but operators looking to deploy or migrate to VDSL2 need a more cost effective means of upgrading the network than pushing a large number of DSLAMs very close to customers. They need better VDSL2 performance – both without vectoring, and adding to it once it has been deployed.
Actelis continues to expand the portfolio with an innovative approach via Broadband Amplifiers (BBAs) that simplify enhancing DSL performance, while being compatible with and additive to the benefits of vectoring – improving the economics of leveraging VDSL2 and ADSL for offering more bandwidth.
Expanding its EFM over Copper solutions from G.SHDSL to VDSL2, Actelis continues to push the envelope on offering higher real world performance per pair, and was the first EFM over Copper vendor to support the full suite of MEF CE2.0 services including E-Access. This enables operators to offer a full suite of standards-based Ethernet services for wholesale as well as retail. Actelis plans integration of G.SHDSL and VDSL2 aggregation to enable efficient deployment of each technology where they best fit the requirement, and continues to scale performance monitoring capabilities to manage today’s high speed traffic flows. Actelis sees G.fast as the next step in copper evolution, and is working toward adding G.fast capabilities that will complement VDSL2. Gfast will be particularly useful for broadband access in selected very high density areas in the metro, and also for high-speed in-building copper wiring. And Actelis continues to look beyond initial G.fast standards to make even higher-speed access over copper a reality in the future.
Actelis will play in NFV and SDN ecosystems, relying on strategic partners for higher layer technologies, integrating our platforms with them, and continuing to provide the Layer 1 and 2 broadband over copper solutions that will be essential to making cost effective broadband over copper necessary to optimize time to market and cost for much of next-gen broadband builds.