Motorola to sell ECI gear

ECI Telecom has partnered with Motorola to penetrate the North American market for IP DSLAMs in fiber-to-the-node (FTTN) and fiber-to-the-curb (FTTC) networks, the companies announced today.

The Israeli equipment vendor has given Motorola the rights to sell and brand its IP DSLAM gear (both central office and outside plant [OSP] products) worldwide, but Motorola will have exclusive rights to sell the gear in North America for about two years.

"Motorola couldn't have chosen a better technology ally than ECI for extending its Ultra-Broadband access portfolio," Erik Keith, senior analyst at Current Analysis, said in a statement released today by ECI. In particular, Keith cited the quality of service features on ECI’s gear as an asset to Motorola.

“[ECI’s portfolio] allows us to address everything from the smallest to the largest opportunities,” said Steve Kish, Motorola’s director of product management. “They’ve got very dense [central office] platforms that support ADSL and VDSL as well as really unique OSP gear--my favorite is a pole-mounted option for less densely populated areas, so you can support a smaller number of connections. It’s a great portfolio to go after telcos that have a number of different densities they want to serve with copper plant.”

ECI remained one of the world’s top five broadband access vendors last year thanks to top-tier customers such as France Telecom and Chunghwa Telecom, Current Analysis said. According to Broadband Trends, ECI was sixth in the overall DSL market last year, with 4.2% of the total ports shipped, while leader Alcatel-Lucent shipped more than a third of all ports. The IP DSLAM market, which represents about half of the 89 million DSL ports shipped last year, was led by Huawei Technologies, Alcatel-Lucent and ZTE Technologies.

Although Motorola already has passive optical networking gear for fiber-to-the-premises networks, ECI’s IP DSLAMs will fill a gap in its portfolio for FTTC and FTTN gear. Motorola acquired VDSL equipment vendor NextLevel Communications a few years ago, whose customers include Qwest Communications. It has also partnered with Amedia Networks for the creation of IP home gateways that carriers would use to deliver IP services over legacy ATM-based DSL networks; that gear should be available this year, Motorola said. The ECI deal also puts Motorola in greater competition with access networking giant Alcatel-Lucent. Both vendors supply fiber access gear to Verizon Communications.

ECI formed a partnership with Nortel Networks in late 2003, a major aim of which was North American penetration. But when that partnership proved disappointing, ECI ended it in early 2006. At the time, Walt Megura, general manager of Nortel's broadband networks group, said ECI's gear was better-suited to the shorter access loops of the European market. Nortel hoped to combine ECI's gear with its own to win major carrier customers. “We were trying to focus on a couple of the big [carriers],” Megura said then. “But the operational costs of swapping the vendors and the volumes you drive didn't make sense.”