Maybe it’s something in the name. Ethernet over copper (EoC) solutions have been around for more than five years, but one can still find a lingering perception that the technology is a bit of a misnomer. Why run Ethernet, a broadband protocol, over ubiquitous but seemingly antiquated, narrow-band copper?
The answer is, this isn’t your father’s copper service. With the advent of bonding technologies that combine two or more twisted pairs, total bandwidth available has gone up dramatically, and the implementation advantages of Ethernet have combined to create a perfect storm of midband access alternatives. Once EoC establishes a name for itself, with the same kinds of performance guarantees that its TDM brethren enjoy, look out! Providers and agents can market and sell, essentially, T1s on steroids and layer a host of value-added services on top of a much fatter access pipe, increasing their addressable market while upselling a broader services menu over a single link.
Ethernet has taken off in the access, or first-mile, space for the same reasons it’s dominated the LAN for decades. EoC offers more bandwidth for the customer’s buck, drastically undercutting TDM access prices, and it provides a familiar handoff to the customer’s CPE, eliminating the complexity of IP or T1/SONET interfaces. As a native Ethernet solution, there’s no need for an underlying Layer 2 WAN circuit. Provisioning and deployment are much simpler and the service itself affords greater visibility into the network, making it easier to manage. And if all that isn’t enough, circuit installation time is often as little as two weeks, whereas a T1 can take months to turn up.
Ethernet is also available in relatively granular bandwidth increments, so customers can increase their capacity as well as the number of services that run over the pipe fairly easily. Actually, EoC offers the most flexible midrange capacity options around, even if bandwidth-on-demand functionality is rare. This is partly because EoC comes in several flavors: EoC over DSL, EoC over NxT1 and/or DS3/NxDS3 and, finally, simple EoC. Among these, bonded circuit speeds generally range from 2 to 3mbps of symmetrical bandwidth (for Ethernet over SDSL), up to 12mbps over DS1 and 35mbps for DS3 and from 2mbps to 30mbps for standard EoC. Some providers use additional bonding to further increase these rates, too.
And for that kind of capacity, the price points can’t be beat. According to agent ARG’s Kristine Palatucci, director of solutions engineering, EoC generally costs about 15-40 percent less than NxT1 or Ethernet over fiber in the most common service segment, those that run about 3 to 10mbps.
Roopashree Honnachari, senior industry analyst, business communication services at research firm Frost & Sullivan, breaks it down like this: “Right now, EoC has to only to be compared to T1s — if earlier you got 1.5mbps for $400 per month, now [with EoC] you get 5mbps for $600, as compared to bundling two T1s and [paying] $800. The price per mbps is no longer increasing linearly — that’s the benefit you are looking at.”
