Oct 20, 2005 4:11 PM,

ECI Telecom thinks small

By Vince Vittore

ECI Telecom this week made a play for the increasingly competitive small DSLAM market with the introduction of its Hi-FOCuS MiniCAB.

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The MiniCAB initially has been developed as a street cabinet that allows carriers to deploy an ADSL2+ DSLAM in locations where cross-connects simply don’t have room for a full DSLAM or as a standalone product close to the end users. The company plans to launch a VDSL2 version of the product early next year.

“We position it as a cabinet because it consists of all of the components in a cabinet,” said Erez Zelikovitz, associate vice president of market development for ECI’S broadband access group. “With a single unit, you get all the functionality of a full cabinet.”

The unit, which consists an active piece and a passive piece, includes a GigE network interface, POTS splitters, DSL modems, line protectors and local or remote power. ECI is envisioning two possible deployment scenarios. One is where the MiniCAB is actually bolted to the side of a cross-connect box. The other is as a stand along DSLAM in areas where carriers have deep fiber penetration and want to provide high-bandwidth services to end users.

Because the units have gigabit Ethernet interfaces on the network side, they can easily provide 48 subscribers with the full-rate ADSL2+ bandwidth on a non-blocking basis, Zelikovitz said.

“If you take an average bandwidth of 15 Mb/s per subscriber, you’ve got a non-blocking architecture,” he said. “The next revision of the box for Q1 2006 will be VDSL2 based and we believe VDSL2 will be able to allow for even greater bandwidth. It will be a new line card that will be integrated into the MiniCAB.”

The reasoning behind creating two separate units (passive and active) was give carriers the ability to deploy and maintain different services on the same equipment.

“If you have to send a technician into the field, you don’t have to disconnect the wires from the passive unit,” Zelikovitz said. “By doing that if you have POTS service during the maintenance activity, POTS will be maintained.”