Zhone Technologies ZTI-PG User Manual

Ethernet over Copper

Application Primer and Product Guide

New Profits 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 fiber

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

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 difficult. 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 offer up to 15 Mbps per pair, bonding up to 8 pairs together. These services offer 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

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

•how Zhone’s extensive EFM solution portfolio can get you started quickly and scale with you efficiently as your EFM business grows.

A C C E S S F O R A C O N V E R G I N G W O R L D

NOICTUDORTiNV

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 informationor 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 traffic 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 traffic. This traffic 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.

Z H O N E T E C H N O L O G I E S E T H E R N E T O V E R C O P P E R

Forecasts aggregated from across the telecommunications industry highlight clearly the magnitude of these changes in non-residential wireline and cellular data traffic — 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 traffic 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 traffic 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 traffic 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

Last-Mile Fiber Penetration in SMO market.

100%

Copper

Fiber

2006 2008

Source: Vertical Systems Group

A C C E S S F O R A C O N V E R G I N G W O R L D

IP Traffic Forecast

(Normalized to 2009 = 100)

2,500

2,000
				Cellular Data
1,500				(125% CAGR)
1,000
					Non-Residential
500					Wireline
					(32% CAGR)
100
2009			2010	2011	2012	2013
Source: Cisco VNI 2009

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).

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 different 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