New ECI minishelves take broadband outside

ECI Telecom unveiled a set of broadband products today for the outside plant, the smallest of which is now available in North America.

The equipment vendor introduced three minishelf products of various sizes, all designed to extend broadband functions from the central office to the outside plant.

The smallest one, the M41, has four line cards and one network interface. It’s 5 rack units tall and can handle up to 192 VDSL subscribers. The M82 is larger, at 8 rack units, with eight line cards and two network interfaces that can handle up to 384 subscribers total. And the largest, the M82C, is 10 rack units tall; it has the same number of line cards and interfaces as the M82 but includes a cable connection panel that allows it to handle up to 512 subscribers.

These devices don’t have as much functionality as their central office counterparts. They lack some of the processing powers of the equipment further upstream, such as subscriber management, scheduling and multicasting capabilities.

“People joke about them; they call them Layer 1 DSLAMs,” said Ran Avital, associate vice president of marketing for ECI's broadband access division.

But outside plant broadband gear is necessary, for example, where carriers want to deliver bandwidth capacities in the 25 Mb/s and 30 Mb/s range to subscribers whose homes are more than a mile away from the nearest carrier central office. Current broadband technologies don’t have that kind of reach.

ECI claims its minishelves are unique in their high bandwidth capacity. The smallest one, the M41, can handle 2 Gb/s per blade. The bigger ones, the M82 and M82C, can handle 4 Gb/s per blade. “Way beyond what you’d ever need on a VDSL card,” Avital said.

Only the M41 is generally available in North America now. The other two products will become available in response to customer demand.

Most of ECI’s outside plant product designs come from its 2000 acquisition of WavePacer, the DSL unit of Pulsecom.

ECI is launching its minishelves in North America now partly because it recently took a stab at the market with a new product, the MiniCab, a hardened, reliable outside plant cabinet device. ECI designed the product for Canadian carrier Telus but didn’t close a sale, so it now wants to try to sell the product, which Avital calls “bulletproof,” to other large North American carriers.

“[The MiniCab] is like having a street cabinet in a box,” Avital said. “It’s designed for rural areas where yahoos may try to shoot it down.”