Former White Rock CEO to lead Aktino

Industry veteran Lonnie Martin, a longtime ADC Telecommunications executive who also helped found White Rock Networks, has stepped in to lead Aktino, an Ethernet-over-copper company hoping to capitalize on the current boom.

Martin, who has been consulting and providing background leadership since White Rock’s assets were sold to Turin Networks and others through a bankruptcy auction. Martin is stepping into the Aktino CEO spot because he believes the company has a differentiated product in the Ethernet-over-copper space.

“We compete against Hatteras Networks and Actelis, which are both good companies,” Martin said. “But where they are using G.SHDSL, we use DMT and MIMO technology, which is normally thought of as a wireless technology, to offer more bandwidth or greater reach.”

Aktino is focused on three primary opportunities. Two are common to the industry – cell site backhaul and delivering symmetrical Ethernet services to businesses not on fiber. The third, Martin said, is helping to upgrade the bandwidth being delivered to DSL access multiplexers, or DSLAMs, so that telcos can improve their ADSL services in competition with cable.

G.SHDSL is an international standard for symmetric service at speeds up to 2.4 Megabits per second over a single pair and in bonded copper pairs can deliver greater speeds. DMT is the original standard for ADSL. MIMO, or multiple-input, multiple-output, uses multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver to improve communication performance.

Aktino chose DMT, said Sam Salib, cofounder and senior vice president of marketing, because it can perform better in cable binders that already contain other high-speed services such as HDSL, an earlier version of symmetrical DSL, or T-1.

“The biggest problem with G.SHDSL and bonding are that the actual SHDSL pairs are their own biggest interferers,” Salib said. “If you have two pair in the binder group do G.SHSDL, the performance of both will go down. We picked DMT because it can bond without causing degradation in performance by bonding your own pairs. Most of our customers are going to be in business parks, which are already served by HDSL and T-1 today.”

Aktino uses MIMO techniques to further improve performance, Salib said. According to Actelis, it is also using MIMO.

“When you have disturbers in the binder, performance is impacted,” Salib said. “It is very similar to wireless – multiple copper pairs in the binder act like antennas, detect signatures of disturbers, recognize disturbers and cancel out their effect. It is the alien disturbers that is what you are trying to cancel out – HDSL, HDSL 2, T-1, or any disturber that can have an effect on how much bandwidth you can put out, either in distance or bandwidth or a combination of both.”

This is particularly helpful for independent telcos that have not done as extensive a cleanup of their existing copper plant as some larger companies were forced to do in order to deliver mass quantities of ADSL in competition with cable companies, Martin said. But Aktino is not just targeting that market.