Aktino: DMT, MIMO Deliver Higher-Performance Copper Bonding Solution

Aktino Inc. says its new VDSL2-based copper bonding product delivers at least twice the performance of competing solutions. The company says its special sauce is a combination of DMT and MIMO techniques.

“In bonded copper today several companies… are doing different techniques to use multicopper pair to get broadband bandwidth,” notes Hossam Salib, Aktino’s vice president of product marketing. “The first focus is business services – like Ethernet on copper. The second focus is backhaul infrastructure applications for telcos” to carry traffic from a cell site or a DSLAM, for example, deeper into the network.

“Most companies that do bonding today use single-pair transceivers, primarily HDSL or G.SHDSL type, which is … basically the same technology. We at PairGain invented this technology several years ago,” says Salib, explaining that Aktino was founded in March 2003 by a group of former employees from PairGain, Alcatel, Globespan, Nokia and Voyan. “We are the only company in the industry that is introducing a true multipair transceiver. This is our own transceiver technology – very similar to what PairGain did back in the early ‘90s when it came in with HDSL.”

Aktino leverages the DMT line code that’s used for ADSL and standards-based VDSL and pairs it with MIMO technology – which cancels crosstalk interference – to deliver a multipair transceiver that offers a “huge performance advantage over HDSL or G.SHDSL-like technology,” Salib says. With the Aktino technology, one transceiver looks at all the bonded pairs and communicates information on the condition of the multiple pairs on that one transceiver. By comparison, HDSL, G.SHDSL and ADSL use single-pair transceivers, meaning there’s one transceiver to each copper pair, Salib says.

Aktino’s AK4000 bonds two to eight copper pairs, supports 802.1d dynamic/transparent bridging and 802.1q VLAN tagging, and includes QoS/CoS features. The line-powered, 1RU high, 19-inch wide box contains four Ethernet ports and is hardened, so it’s suitable for use in either remote terminal or central office deployments.

Of course, the bandwidth provided by any DSL solution depends upon the number of pairs in use, the type of copper and the reach of the application. But Salib says in a scenario (with disturbers) using four pairs of 26-gauge copper at 9,000 feet, G.SHDSL delivers a little below 1.5mbps per pair. “With our technology it’s 2.5meg per pair – so 10meg,” he says. “And, actually, our labs are showing better [performance].”

Equipment that offers near bandwidth-parity with T1s is at a big disadvantage in the marketplace because the services it supports compete directly with RBOC T1 revenue, which the incumbent carriers don’t want to see cannibalized, and because most customers that are buying metro Ethernet services want it at 10mbps, 100mbps, a gigabit or at some increment in between, Salib says. “You come with a technology that can only offer – at 12,000 feet with a reasonable number of pairs – 3meg or 5meg, it’s not a big seller,” he says. “Our technology … can use the same low number of pairs and now give 10meg, 20meg, 30meg even 50meg at anywhere from four to eight pairs. And that is a big, really, breakthrough.”

Salib adds that delivering more bandwidth over fewer copper pairs significantly affects the addressable market for business-focused DSL solutions, noting that more than 80 percent of business customers not served by fiber have four or more pairs, but only about 35 percent of that same group has access to eight or more fiber pairs.

Commenting on Salib’s claims regarding Aktino and competing technologies, Yossi Saad, vice president of marketing and business development at Actelis, says that his company’s Ethernet in the First Mile product offers up to 16mbps at 12,000 feet and 20mbps at 8,000 feet over four pairs of 24-gauge copper assuming disturbers.

“The Actelis products are widely deployed and approved by many service providers, so we feel comfortable about what we can achieve and what we can promise to our customers,” adds Saad of Actelis, whose gear is based on extended G.SHDSL technology, or G.992.1.bis, which was selected by the IEEE as the line code for long-reach EFM.

Saad adds that Actelis has implemented MIMO and DSM concepts since its first product was deployed three years ago and is improving its MIMO support with every release of the product. “The MIMO concept takes into consideration all the lines when determining what to transmit on each line, which is why it improves the performance of [the] SHDSL system by minimizing and canceling the interferences, as we have proven to service providers worldwide,” Saad explains. “The improvement over ‘older’ SHDSL systems was shown to be an additional 120 percent in a specific test we conducted in a major European PTT's lab, and up to additional 200 percent in other occasions. The inherent resilience of SHDSL to external T1 interferences increases the performance of our systems beyond what is provided by any other implementation.”

But Salib of Aktino says that HDSL is an echo cancellation technology that is based on a pulse amplitude modulation scheme, whereas Aktino’s product uses frequency division multiplexing. “So it’s really very difficult to do any MIMO techniques with this [G.SHDSL] technology, and it would be very expensive, and it won’t result in the same performance gains,” Salib says.

While the Aktino’s G.bond-based AK4000 is being formally announced this week at SUPERCOMM, the company actually introduced the product earlier this year for trials and recently began shipping it for revenue. The AK4000, for which Atkino declined to provide pricing, is still in limited deployments. Early users include a major IOC which is using the box for Ethernet services, and a regional CLEC in California, says Atkino’s Ben Culp, senior marketing communications manager. The box is also in the labs with an RBOC and “America’s largest IOC,” Culp adds.

The AK4000 is Aktino’s second product to hit the market. In May the company announced another MIMO over DMT solution, the AK3000, which has been shipping to select customers since October 2004. This product is for long-reach DS3 over copper applications.

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines