Ethernet over PDH

Most Ethernet service offerings in place today are delivered over a carrier’s fiber network, infrastructure that the carrier owns and can control.

But there are a few interesting statistics from Vertical Systems Group that illustrate how a large portion of the potential Ethernet services market is underserved. The first statistic is that fiber reaches only about 11.7% of the business locations in the United States with more than 20 employees, and slightly more than half of that percentage of sites in Europe.

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This means that there are hundreds of thousands of business locations, both large and small, that can only be accessed by copper. Most of these locations are reached today using T1/E1s or DSL. Another statistic is that in the U.S., business customers use more than a million DSL lines plus another 1.4 million T1 circuits for voice traffic, connecting PBXs and key systems to a central office or other locations, or for data services, providing private line, frame relay, ATM or Internet access.

The conclusion is that offering Ethernet services only over fiber severely limits the true potential of Ethernet and severely curtails the uptake of these services by the end customer. In addition, any provider who worries about revenue cannibalization, and will not offer Ethernet services to all of their customers’ locations, will ultimately lose that customer’s business to another provider – one who sees the value in offering Ethernet over both fiber and copper. For this new breed of Ethernet service providers, these unserved customers  mean new revenues and an increased customer base.

Overture Networks' ISG products can bond T1 or E1 circuits together, creating solutions that can provide multi-megabit connections to those offices that cannot be reached by fiber.