Zhone Technologies ZTI-PG User Manual
Ethernet over Copper
Application Primer and Product Guide
New Prots from Old Copper
Learn how to drive new revenue growth with multi-megabit
Ethernet services over existing copper
Meet rising demand for access bandwidth in small/medium business, municipal, and
cellular backhaul applications, without the high capital cost of deploying ber
Offer...
• much more bandwidth than T1/E1 at lower cost
• Ethernet ease of use
• higher reliability of bonded pairs
• advanced networking services
• touchless provisioning
This guide will show you how.
Access for a Converging World
Your Opportunity
in Ethernet over
Copper Services
VINTRODUCTION
Demand for more bandwidth and service
sophistication continues to rise quickly across
every telecom segment. For small/medium
businesses, municipalities, and cellular
operators, obtaining higher-bandwidth
connectivity to the wide-area network is often
dicult. The cost of running fiber to the
premise is prohibitively high for many in these
segments, limiting them to the same T1/E1based services they’ve been using for years.
Fortunately, technology advances have brought
new life to copper loops. With Ethernet over
copper (also commonly referred to as EFM,
for Ethernet in the First Mile) solutions,
network operators can oer up to 15 Mbps
per pair, bonding up to 8 pairs together.
services that tie multiple locations together
seamlessly or monitor service levels with great
precision.
This application primer and product guide
will give you an overview of how to take
advantage of the clear opportunity in EFM
services — looking at:
• key drivers of demand in the relevant
market segments,
• how EFM technology can support
attractive new services targeted at these
segments,
• the ease of EFM implementation in a
scalable multi-service architecture,
• business cases for alternative operators,
and finally
These services oer advantages beyond raw
bandwidth, including very low capital costs,
the simplicity and ease of use of Ethernet,
higher reliability from fault-tolerant bonded
pairs, and the facility for advanced network
• how Zhone’s extensive EFM solution
portfolio can get you started quickly and
scale with you eciently as your EFM
business grows.
A C CE S S FO R A C O N V ER G I NG WO R L D
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4 Z HO N E T E CH N O LO G I ES E T H E RN E T O V ER CO P P ER
Customer Demand for Advanced
Services
The customer segments for which EFM-based services are
potentially valuable fall into two distinct groups. The
first and broader group consists of small and mediumsized organizations with inherently information- or
communication-intensive activity. These organizations
include commercial businesses as well as smaller publicsector entities such as municipalities and schools — all
with reasonably similar networking requirements today.
The needs of smaller remote locations of larger organizations are also very similar, with a few specific requirements for cross-organization connectivity that go beyond
those of independent small businesses or organizations.
The second group is the cellular operator community, in
particular the last-mile backhaul connectivity to their cell
towers.
Changes in communication and information processing
are increasing demand for bandwidth and more sophisticated services in both groups. For small/medium organizations (or SMOs), applications continue to involve ever
richer content, with more and higher-resolution digital
imagery, and increasing amounts of video content and
videoconferencing. The software-as-service model is
growing robustly in these segments because of its attractive economics especially for smaller-scale operations,
increasing network trac along the way. For large
organizations with distributed operations, the steady
increase in data-driven processes and management
approaches is turning remote sites into essentially small
data centers. This is particularly prevalent in the retail
segment. The mission-critical role of IT in these distributed operations complicates and increases the importance
of high-uptime, seamless network connectivity.
For wireless operators, the advent of 3G smartphones
with easy-to-use interfaces and compelling networkbased applications has substantially accelerated growth in
cellular wireless data trac. This trac growth is quickly
outpacing the ability of operators to put up new cell sites
or tap new spectrum bands to accommodate it, so the
capacity utilization of existing sites continues to rise.
Since the capacity of a radio network is only as good as
the bandwidth of its connection back to the core
network, the rising utilization of 3G and 3.5G cell sites is
creating similarly rising demand for backhaul
connectivity.
Forecasts aggregated from across the telecommunications
industry highlight clearly the magnitude of these changes
in non-residential wireline and cellular data trac —
with 32% and an astounding 125% compound annual
growth rates, respectively. Given the relatively slow
growth in the population of SMOs and cell sites, the
trac per location looks set to continue rising substantially.
The Opportunity in Last-Mile
Copper
While the telecom industry’s response to demand for
higher bandwidth is generally to push fiber closer to the
customer premise, for SMOs and many cell sites, there
are complications with that approach. While the forecast
trac growth rate in these segments is substantial, it’s
starting from a very small base — typically something on
the order of a 1.5 Mbps T1 or 2.0 Mbps E1 data service
line. For these smaller sites, it will take years of steady
trac growth to reach the point where service demand
and willingness to pay will justify the high costs of
running fiber to these premises. Unlike residential
neighborhoods where the cost of fiber deployment can be
more easily amortized over a number of subscribers, the
lower teledensity of SMOs and cell sites means the fiber
deployment business case for an individual location must
bear the full installation costs largely alone. Given these
realities, the slow rate of growth in fiber penetration to
businesses is unsurprising. One industry analyst, Vertical
IP Traffic Forecast
IP Traffic Forecast
(Normalized to 2009 = 100)
(Normalized to 2009 = 100)
2,500
2,500
2,000
2,000
1,500
1,500
1,000
1,000
500
500
100
100
2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
2009
Source: Cisco VNI 2009
2010 2011 2012 2013
Cellular Data
Cellular Data
(125% CAGR)
(125% CAGR)
Non-Residential
Non-Residential
(32% CAGR)
(32% CAGR)
Wireline
Wireline
Systems Group, reported in 2006 that only 13.4% of
businesses in the US were served by fiber. Two years later
their 2008 survey found just 19.1% penetration of fiber
connections in the business segment. The business case
for fiber deployment to these segments is obviously
improving, but at a modest rate that will leave the large
majority of these customers limited to copper-based
solutions for some time.
EFM Technology
Fortunately there is an excellent solution for these copperbound SMO and cell site applications in the form of
Ethernet over Copper, and in particular the industrystandard Ethernet in the First Mile technology (commonly referred to as EFM).
Last-Mile Fiber Penetration in SMO market.
100%
Copper
Fiber
2006
Source: Vertical S
A C CE S S FO R A C O N V ER G I NG WO R L D
y
2008
stems Grou
p
EFM in Context
To clarify terminology, it’s helpful to look at EFM in the
general context of the growing adoption of Ethernet.
Since Ethernet is taking dierent forms in access, distribution, and core networks, the jargon can be confusing.
The table on the next page provides a summary snapshot
of the various Ethernet technologies in use today outside
the LAN environment. The overlap between the application groupings (the horizontal axis) is the primary source
of confusion. The IEEE 802.3ah standard, the more
formal name for EFM, actually covers both fiber and
copper technologies. In practice, though, the term
“Active Ethernet” is used for 802.3ah standards over
point-to-point fiber, leaving EFM as the working term for
802.3ah over copper. The higher-speed Metro Ethernet
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