Critical intros Fred to U.S.

LAS VEGAS—Critical Telecom, which announced $12.7 million in equity funding last week, made its American debut this week at the U.S. Telecom Association show here.

The company’s flagship product, Full Rate Extended DSL (Fred), lets carriers provide up to 8 Mb/s of downstream data using ADSL up to 82,000 feet from a CO assuming fiber is deep into the network. The Canadian company has been working with Canadian telcos SaskTel and Telus on extending DSL service across their networks and thinks the U.S. independent market is ripe for the technology.

Fred acts as a passive device that can be deployed into cross-connect boxes, repeating and extending any type of DSL signal it is fed. The unit, which cuts installation costs 65% compared to remote DSLAMS, is line-powered with a single copper pair up to 8000 feet. Later this year, Critical will unveil a fiber-fed unit.

“The key is making it simple,” said Mark Labbé, chief technology officer of Critical. “We don’t want to be the bottleneck.”

Initially, the company anticipates most carriers will want to use it as an ADSL extender. However, as ADSL 2+ is deployed to support video applications, Fred will be able to pass on those streams, said Labbé.

So far, the company has done interoperability testing with the five largest CO-based DSLAM vendors and is in the process of certifying several varieties of ADSL modems. Additionally, Critical has filed an application to get on the Rural Utilities Service approved list.