The 3 R's of EFM

In today’s environment, any new investment requires significant justification and a near immediate return on that investment. As operators are facing rapidly increasing demand for broadband EFM services from business customers, as well as for backhauling both IP DSLAMs and cell towers, they need to figure out how to meet these demands while mitigating the risk. Although fiber could deliver these Ethernet services, only a limited number of locations that require fiber actually have access to it. Additionally, new fiber installs are occurring very slowly due to high construction costs and, therefore, are nearly impossible to justify, especially in these trying market conditions.

Operators are finding the business case for leveraging their existing copper networks to be highly attractive. The savings on infrastructure costs can be dramatic, often as much as 10 times cheaper than fiber with ROI as short as three to four months. But some are asking for information that proves copper will provide the required bandwidth over sufficient distances, with the reliability necessary to sustain the SLAs their retail and wholesale customers now insist on.

This is why at Actelis we refer to the “3 R’s of EFM: Rate, Reach and Reliability,” reflecting our absolute conviction that these are as fundamental to delivering broadband services over copper as the 3 R’s, Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, are to education. For EFM, the 3 R’s underpin the ability of copper to provide a fiber-like experience. Actelis has addressed each of the 3 R’s, in turn, with patented extensions to the standard EFM technology and bundled them in our EFMplus™ layer, thus separating Actelis from other EFM over copper companies.

The 3 R’s are essential to elevate copper to the level required by tomorrow’s broadband services. Many operators currently deliver T1 or E1-based services over copper, which at the rate of just 768 Kbps (1 Mbps for E1) per copper pair just do not scale up cost effectively to broadband EFM. Too many pairs would have to be recruited at too high a cost, even assuming that sufficient numbers were available. While standard EFM-based products are an improvement over T1/E1, Actelis has leapfrogged the industry with its EFMplus to deliver the utmost in copper performance and reliability with the promise of continually redefining the state of the art across all of the 3 R’s. This gives operators the assurance they need that our products will continue to match the ever-increasing levels of service their customers demand.