Zhone mines fertile copper Ethernet market overseas

Zhone Technologies is taking advantage of a fertile market overseas for Ethernet over copper (EoC) equipment, introducing more EoC gear today and hailing what it claims is the world’s largest EoC deployment to date.

Zhone originally added EoC--based on the IEEE’s Ethernet First Mile (EFM) standard, 802.3ah--to its MALC multiservice access platform a year ago. Today the company is adding that technology to the DSLAM products it obtained through acquiring Paradyne Networks in 2005. The vendor introduced three new EFM line cards in response to demands from existing customers. One new card includes network timing functions, which help synchronize frames to enable use of pseudowires. Another card includes line-powering--powering the customer premises gear using the copper access line itself. “That’s something we’ll tell the world about in more detail in a number of months,” said Steven Glapa, Zhone’s vice president of marketing and product management. “We’re trying to keep quiet about it for now.”

The company also introduced new EtherXtend customer premises gear to cover a broader range of carrier preferences. For example, its new EtherXtend 3000, like its existing 3300, offers 5.7 Mb/s of bandwidth using SHDSL.bis and EFM technology and four 10/100 LAN ports. But while the 3300 included 4 or 8 WAN ports, the new 3000 includes 1, 2 or 4 ports for a lower cost. Another new product, the 2200, is designed for DS-3 mobile backhaul.

Along with the new products, Zhone announced having won a contract to supply EFM gear to Saudi Arabia’s incumbent carrier, Saudi Telecom, which has plans to deploy EFM to more than 60,000 lines.

Such large deployments will be more common in Europe and the Middle East than in North America over at least the next year or two, Zhone said. That’s partly due to recent regulatory changes in Europe, which allow competitive carriers to offer Ethernet services over copper lines leased from incumbents. EFM has seen a lot of traction from among competitive local exchange carriers in the U.S. (albeit in smaller deployments than the Saudi initiative) but not as much from major incumbents here, Zhone said.

“It’s a huge cash cow right now to sell T-1s [in the U.S.],” said Steve Klein, Zhone’s marketing director. “Until they see some pain, [U.S. incumbent carriers] are going to continue on their merry way until they have to change.”

Zhone’s business has been shifting more toward international markets in recent months, with half of its $44 million in second quarter revenue coming from outside the U.S.