Mid-band Ethernet finds small-business market

Ethernet-over-copper technology is rapidly accelerating the market for selling Ethernet services to small businesses, according to panelists at Insights for Next-Generation ILECs, Telephony's summit preceding NXTcomm08 in Las Vegas last month.

Often, said Frank Schueneman, senior vice president of network services for Windstream, “[Customers] want a 10 Mb Ethernet connection, and they don't care how.”

EoC adds more choices for customers to get those connections and brings them to areas where other choices — such as laying fiber or adding more T-1s — are prohibitively uneconomical. But the technology also allows providers to talk about the value of the service rather than the technology or its transition medium — a key aspect of winning over small businesses.

“It turns into a cost-per-meg discussion,” said Glenn Moore, director of marketing and sales operations for Cavalier Telephone. “More bandwidth makes business work better, so weave it into how much better business will work and if you can cut your cost per meg as you go.”

Cavalier has been selling 3, 5 and 10 Mb/s service over copper since last fall, targeting businesses with around 25 employees and seeing nearly 15% growth there each quarter. Cavalier has adopted the habit in many cases of laying extra copper where it deploys Ethernet to leave room for future growth — because doing so is still usually much cheaper than deploying fiber.

“In a small business, it needs to be simple,” Moore said “They don't care about the last mile. They just want to know it's reliable, priced right, you can put it in quickly and it's not going to break — or if it does, you can fix it.”

The symmetrical bandwidth of these Ethernet offerings also gives providers an edge against the lopsided offerings of cable companies, Moore and Schueneman agreed.

And the penetration of the medium-sized business market in recent years is increasingly trickling down into smaller businesses today. XO Communications, which has been selling EoC services to medium-sized businesses nationwide for years, recently reported having signed up more than 20 resellers in the past six months, including Speakeasy, the former Seattle ISP that is now a unit of Best Buy focused on small businesses. As those resellers use the same deployed base of equipment to take the service down market, allowing XO to focus on 10 Mb/s services and higher, all these providers are sharing information about where customer demand is located and where the technology can reach.

Because mid-band Ethernet is deployed over existing copper of varying degrees of length and quality, EoC deployment is still “more of a black art than a science,” said Kevin Sheehan, CEO of Hatteras Networks, one of the leading vendors of such equipment.

But on the Insights panel, Sheehan said that EOC black art is getting more scientific all the time. “There are new tools embedded in the product that make it a lot easier to qualify the loop before you turn up the services,” he said. “Equipment can tell you how far out the loop is before they even visit the premises, and new tools take out the historic pain of copper services.”

The more uniform the process becomes, the simpler it is to order and use — and the more that simplicity becomes a selling point in the small-business market.