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As cablecos turn up the heat with the rollout of DOCSIS 3.0-enabled 100mbps services, and bandwidth-hungry applications and regulators pressure service providers to deliver access at 100mbps rates and beyond, telcos are faced with a dilemma. How do they quickly and affordably bring to market these kinds of high-bandwidth services to those 30 to 50 percent of homes for which FTTH isn’t a viable option? ADTRAN says its new architecture, called Ultra Broadband Ethernet, can help answer that question.

Kevin Morgan (News - Alert), director of product marketing at ADTRAN, tells TMCnet that service providers came to the company asking for a solution to help them deliver higher speeds to locations for which fiber to the home technology doesn’t make sense due to right of way issues, costs or other factors. ADTRAN’s (News - Alert) Ultra Broadband Ethernet technology will help carriers do that, he says, by outfitting them with relatively low-power, pure Ethernet solutions that serve eight homes from a single, hardened ONT.

The technology delivers 100mbps of symmetrical bandwidth per home and uses just 1.25Watts of energy per port, Morgan says.

“Powering has become very much of a hot button issue in terms of network transformation,” he notes, adding that the new ADTRAN solution requires no more power per port than a child’s nightlight.

Because the ONT sits at a shared node in the Ultra Broadband Ethernet architecture, he adds, costs are controlled because fiber trenching is kept to a minimum and network operators can leverage their existing rights of way and drops to the home. And the fact that it uses Ethernet end to end controls network delay by eliminating protocol conversions, Morgan continues.

That makes Ultra Broadband Ethernet more affordable, particularly in existing neighborhoods, than GPON-based FTTH solutions (which today deliver about 78mbps per subscriber). With GPON, he explains, carriers need to use splitters, take fiber to every home, and install and maintain an ONT at every home. Active Ethernet solutions, meanwhile, offer bandwidth of up to 1gig, but require homerun fiber, so that’s costly, he adds.

ADTRAN is in Ultra Broadband Ethernet trials with Tier 1 operators in North America, Europe and Asia. The company expects to unveil a line of Ultra Broadband Ethernet solutions in the first half of 2011, when the products will become commercially available.