Actelis is among several vendors making its products more palatable to service providers bidding for broadband stimulus funding. The vendor announced that it has received "Technical Acceptance" and "Buy American" status from the Rural Utilities Service branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture for four additional products including the ML600 Ethernet Access Devices (EADs), the ML2300 next-gen Ethernet aggregation platforms, and the XR239 EFM Repeaters and PFU-8 power feeding units that provide remote power for the XR239 repeaters.
With these designations, Actelis believes it will be able to make its EoC-based products more attractive to smaller service providers that want to leverage their existing copper networks for DSLAM backhaul, wireless backhaul and new copper-based Ethernet business services. The kicker, argues Actelis, is greater customer reach and lower costs. Although fiber is the future, Ethernet over Copper can come in handy in situations where a service provider can't prove out the business case and related construction costs to build out fiber to a DSLAM or business location. Smaller Tier 2 and Tier 3 service providers, while making efforts to increase their fiber footprints, still have an abundant amount of existing copper. Actelis' bets aren't completely unfounded as a recent Heavy Reading study forecast that combined global Ethernet over copper pair platform sales will reach about $500 million by 2013.
"In today's economic environment, any new investment requires significant justification and a near immediate return on that investment," said Eric Vallone, vice president of marketing at Actelis Networks, in a press release. "Operators across North America have proven that the business case for leveraging their existing copper networks is the best way to maximize broadband deployments while minimizing costs."
For more:
- see the release here
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