Actelis turns copper into fiber -- for transport

While maintaining it’s using mathematics, not magic, Actelis Networks has introduced a way to squeeze fiber-quality optic transport services onto local loop copper in point-to-point configurations.

“The very simple explanation of what we do is take a couple reeds, each very sensitive and breakable, and bond them together to create something very strong and unbreakable,” said Tuvia Barlev, the company’s president-CEO.

Those two “reeds” are actually copper pairs. By combining multiple pairs and dredging the strong points of those pairs, the company is able to reduce the possibility that the link will break, and, in turn, increase the total capability. Four combined pairs “will provide fiber quality,” said Barlev.

“The main thing is to try to do that transparently, providing this type of channel with the capability of delivering any kind of service at the same time, not delaying the service and creating problems for voice, video and other sensitive transmissions,” he said.

Cincinnati Bell Telecom is the first customer to use the technology as a way to deliver more bandwidth to a technologically savvy high school without laying expensive fiber lines, Barlev said.

“They’ve trialed the product in their labs for many types of applications, including DS3 services, Ethernet and data services, and video services, broadband analog video, a very sensitive type of transmission,” Barlev said.

Actelis executives stressed that the technology uses algorithmic computations to deliver better results from the existing copper pairs.

“Often, people have a perception of copper based on the performance of any one pair. We’re taking multiple pairs and saying ‘if this pair is 80% good, if I take two or three pairs and combine the 80% good part, I can find excellent quality,’” said David Perry, Actelis’ marketing director.

The result requires “quite a bit of processing power,” Perry admitted, but lower silicon prices make processing cheaper and faster than laying new fiber lines, particularly when quickly feeding demand from bandwidth-hungry business customers.

Actelis has applied crosstalk cancellation algorithms to reduce noise and purify signals, boosting the system’s performance, said Barlev.

“It requires very substantial computation power, something like 100 giga-instructions per second,” he said.

The company’s gear also will pre-qualify existing copper to determine its condition.

None of this comes cheap, the Actelis execs said, but it is better than the alternative.

“The sand you dig out of the fields or the streets when you deploy fiber is probably more expensive than the sand that is used for the silicon,” Barlev said.

A DS3 would cost between $3000 to $500 per month for the end user. Ethernet service would be $1000 a month, Barlev said.

This, he said, would give carriers a one-year return on investment.

We feel that we can offer them something comparable to the cost of fiber multiplexers, but save them the cost of the fiber deployment,” Barlev said. “We realize there is some cost of silicon that has to be invested in such a system.”