Fiber bender

Extreme Networks and TollBridge Technologies want their high-speed network products to travel the last mile. And they don't don't care what transport mechanism is used—ranging from twisted pair to fiber.

To make it happen, Extreme has acquired last-mile copper provider Optranet, and TollBridge is partnering with fiber-to-the-user specialist World Wide Packets. Adding Optranet was a natural progression for Extreme, said President and CEO Gordon Stitt. “This is not a cold acquisition. They've already been developing on our technology for about a year now,” he said.

Optranet plugs a gap in Extreme's “Ethernet Everywhere” strategy, he continued. “Sometimes you just can't get fiber to a particular building,” Stitt said. “This gives us the ability to extend our strategy to include legacy WAN technologies—T-1 over twisted pair, DS-3 over coax, traditional telco technologies. Optranet has built interfaces and software to integrate those onto our platform.”

Optranet also gives Extreme another way to serve multi-tenant unit (MTU) customers, said Darrell Scherbarth, Optranet's CEO, president and founder. “Within a building or campus environment, we can use VDSL to connect telephone twisted pair at 10 megabit symmetric and connect between multiple Extreme boxes or even going to a customer premise modem that allows us to connect to a VDSL external connection,” Scherbarth said.

Extreme already offers fiber and Category 5 cabling to MTUs. “By including the VDSL in there, we allow [MTU customers] to create a 10 megabit symmetric connection over existing twisted pair telephone wiring,” Scherbarth said. “This can be particularly useful looking at the capitalization models that they're faced with today.”

TollBridge understands the value of twisted pair, coax and wireless transport; now it's chasing fiber's possibilities.

“At the beginning of last year, we decided that we really needed to look at what media reached what markets and to address the broadest possible array of markets,” said Marketing Vice President Agnes Imregh.

That means delivering voice through whatever transport is available, including DSL, cable and wireless. Partnering with World Wide Packets is part of TollBridge's plan. “Whenever there's a medium and a set of carriers that offers high-speed data capabilities, we believe we have an answer as far as voice,” Imregh said.

Fiber is World Wide Packets' end game for the last mile. In fact, fiber is the company's only game. “Everything is fiber-based, IP-based. We then enable services that can be provisioned up to a full gigabit with Ethernet,” said Octavio Morales, World Wide Packets' marketing vice president.

Morales dismissed claims that fiber home runs are too expensive and deliver more bandwidth than necessary. “We have done a lot of studies, and on the average, [running fiber] all the way to the customer premises is roughly $1000 per home passed,” said Morales.

That's still expensive if the only thing running on that fiber is voice.

“Voice alone won't do it,” he agreed. Voice has more cost elasticity and is more ubiquitous than video or data—the latter two offer incremental service and revenue opportunities, he said. Voice can lead the way as the more lucrative services go along for the ride on Morales' fiber route.

“Future broadband networks are not going to be based on copper,” he said flatly. “I think a lot of people are realizing that the future medium is definitely fiber-based.”

The key word is future, Stitt said. “It's great to bring a [fiber] ring to the metro area, but you need to build that true broadband connection to a customer,” said Stitt. Broadband speeds over existing infrastructure can't be dismissed, he emphasized.

“When [VDSL is] integrated into our provisioning platform, this looks just like an Ethernet connection,” Stitt said. “The difference is it runs over good old ordinary telco wire.”

Briefly

A wireless record

Broadband fixed wireless is hot, as evidenced by the fact that the Wireless Communications Association Technical Symposium garnered a 500% attendance increase over a year before. This month's San Jose-based conference drew a record 1185 registrants, easily outstripping last year's record level of 235 registrants.