Zhone adds EFM copper bonding to BLC

Zhone Technologies announced new line cards for its flagship broadband loop carrier (BLC) platform today that deliver Ethernet services over bonded copper loops.

Zhone’s EtherXtend 319 and 719 cards, based on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ 802.3ah Ethernet First Mile (EFM) standard, fit into the vendor’s Multi-Access Line Concentrator (MALC) BLC. Each card can deliver up to 5.7 Mb/s over an existing SHDSL circuit, 1.54 Mb/s over a T-1 or 2 Mb/s over an E-1. The platform can bond up to 8 circuits to deliver a 45-Mb/s service. The entire MALC chassis can support up to 960 ports.

To accompany the line cards, Zhone is introducing new EtherXtend customer premises equipment (CPE).

The technology came to Zhone through its acquisition last summer of Paradyne, which, in turn, obtained the technology through its acquisition of Net to Net, which began deploying it in 1998. It has previously been sold in Zhone’s IPD12000 modular DSLAM.

“What Paradyne missed was, they didn’t put [EFM] in the balance of their platforms,” said David Markowitz, Zhone’s vice president of marketing. “They had it in that one product, the IPD. They never extended it onto the 8800 platform or any of their other DSLAMs.”

In trying to allow service providers to deploy high-bandwidth Ethernet services to locations lacking fiber, Zhone competes with EFM equipment vendors such as Hatteras Networks and Actelis Networks, a crowd Markowitz dismissed as too narrowly focused.

“Most of the competition we see are strictly [802.3ah-based] companies; that’s all they do,” he said. “Carriers that want to deliver more than that--DSL, POTS, whatever--might like to see a single platform that can manage it all.”

Zhone’s new line cards are currently being deployed by Norwegian carriers Ventelo and Telenor and Finnish service provider Finnet.

Zhone will continue selling and supporting the IPD as well as its accompanying CPEs, with which the new gear is compatible. But for new deployments, “We’ll push the MALC first,” Markowitz said. “It’s doing most if not all of what the IPD did.”

A future release will include EFM-based circuit bonding for Ethernet over fiber.