Hatteras Networks (News - Alert) today unveiled three new carrier Ethernet solutions, all available today, that support Ethernet over legacy connections. The company also introduced a technology called “PWE3-plus” and revealed plans to deliver line cards supporting Ethernet over fiber in short order.

CEO Kevin Sheehan told TMCnet that Hatteras was founded with the goal of making Ethernet carrier-grade by infusing it with the kind of traffic shaping and other features that service providers had come to enjoy with frame relay. Now that it’s done that, he says, Hatteras is layering services on top of that. In the past Hatteras only targeted applications in which service providers served customers with dry copper pairs, he adds; the new gear allows carriers to deliver services over T1/E1 and dry copper pairs, all over the same platform.

Announced today were the HN6100 Ethernet switch, and the HN600 and HN500 customer premises solutions.

The HN6100 is a modular, multiservice 40gbps solution designed for Ethernet business services, and DSLAM and mobile backhaul applications. Hatteras offers eight different cards for various interfaces and network uplinks on the HN6100, which is a NEBS Level 3 solution that provides “industry leading density in a two-rack box,” said Sheehan, adding the product offers 10 times the bandwidth of some competing solutions.

The HN600, meanwhile, is half a rack wide and a full rack unit high and supports several T1s or E1s and Ethernet. It is designed for mobile backhaul applications and can be used to drop one of more T1s to legacy PBX (News - Alert) buildings.

 It can bond up to eight copper pairs from a tower to a central office, allowing service providers to break off TDM traffic at a tower, and then backhaul the TDM and Ethernet in native format with timing.

“Successfully providing increased bandwidth and low latencies to mobile users utilizing the Faroese Telecom network has been a difficult task given the inherent cost of upgrading our mobile backhaul infrastructure,” said Dan Olsen, manager transmission networks at Faroese Telecom. “We are committed to providing highly reliable, efficient and cost-effective communications services, and we can quickly and easily extend the benefits of Ethernet to more customers without the cost of installing fiber thanks to our partnership with Hatteras Networks.”

Because both traffic types are carried in their native format, Sheehan explains, Hatteras refers to the technology as pseudo-wire plus. PWE3-plus, which is not a new standard but rather a new practice and term coined by Hatteras, is built into the HN600 and available as a new line card for the HN6100, Sheehan adds. He explains that PWE3-plus is the Hatteras take on the standard PWE3, but it’s better because it “perfectly emulates a T1 and precisely passes timing synchronization information” while traditional PWE3 suffers from the delay, jitter and timing impacts of packetization,

The HN500 is a new demarcation box that supports line cards for Ethernet over TDM on the HN6100. If the service provider can only reach a particular customer location with a T1 or E1, this solution can run Ethernet over bonded T1s or E1s. Each HN500 can support up to eight T1s or E1s and a single Ethernet interface.

The HN6100 starts at $3,190. HN600 with PWE3-plus starts at $2,195. The HN500 starts at $2,195.